Book Review: The Whole Truth by David Baldacci

David Baldacci's thrillers seem to capture the pulse of the nation and current events with unnerving accuracy.  His latest book "The Whole Truth" looks at what would happen if a war was manufactured through internet blogs, fake news leaks, and the deliberate dissemination of false information. Nicolas Creel, a major defense contractor, decides to create a war or at least the fear of a war in order to build his sales of military equipment to nations across the globe.  Creel is the books evil villain, but Matt Pender is the evil genius.  Pender operates a firm that manufactures the truth to suit its clients.  Through a variety of tools he creates worldwide outrage against Russia, and then pits Russia against arch rival China in a battle that threatens the entire world with nuclear destruction. 

The book's hero is a giant of man named Shaw who has a heart as big as his fists. Shaw reluctantly works for a secret agency that does the CIA's dirty work outside the restrictions of law.  When Shaw falls in love and decides to retire, he learns that his life is not his own and he must come to grips with a bleak future while continuing his deadly job.

As a reporter, I loved that fact that Baldacci made a reporter and the role of the press in a free world as a major part of this thriller.  Katie James, a Pulitzer Prizing winning reporter with a drinking problem, seeks the truth, not the big pay check.  She sees through the false story that Pender has created and works with Shaw to stop Armageddon.

The book has some eerie similarities to how the Iraq situation went from a search for WMDs to a political standoff and eventually to war.  It will make you think twice about believing what you read in newspapers; hear on TV and especially what you read on the Internet.  The book demonstrates how easy it is to fool people and how people can get passionately behind cause without much more than a few well planned Internet postings.  It asks what truth is and how do we separate truth from lies. 

Baldacci does not take political sides, but merely paints a picture of how a cause and a perceived truth can be manufactured and how this translates to power on a global level. At a time when tens of thousands of people rally to hear Obama speak in Germany and he has quickly become a worldwide political figure, I cannot help but think about how effectively he has used the power of the Internet to gain money and power, and how it mirrors the way Baldacci's character used the Internet to control world opinion.  This is not a negative view of the candidate, just a real life observation of the effectiveness of the Internet in building a world wide acceptance for a political candidate or cause.

Overall, there are almost too many twists and turns to make the plot work, but the message of power is strong enough to keep you reading.  His characters are bigger-than-life and his backdrop includes Ireland, New York, Italy, Washington, DC and Germany to name just a few locales.