It's Puller vs. Puller in David Baldacci's Latest: The Escape

The Escape - David Baldacci

As Bulwer-Lytton wrote, “It was a dark and stormy night”… The power went off, and the backup generators died, but when the lights came back on there was a single prisoner missing: disgraced former Colonel Robert Puller (USAF) had simply disappeared from what may well be the most secure prison in the world. So how did a convicted traitor in solitary confinement engineer The Escape of the century? There may well be just one investigator who could figure that out and track down Robert Puller: Chief Warrant Officer John Puller, Army CID. Notice those same last names? That’s because the two are brothers.

Puller begins his investigation by learning why his elder brother was serving a life-without-parole sentence in Leavenworth to begin with. It’s espionage, for which he was convicted based on testimony from two of his erstwhile coworkers. Partnered for the nonce with a spook from some three-letter agency or other (a long-legged, tasty redhead, naturally) Chief Puller soon concludes that his big brother had been the victim of a frame job – but by whom? and why? More importantly to we readers, how high will the body count be by the time he figures out how to clear the brother’s name (you can’t call that a spoiler, since you knew when you picked up a Baldacci book how it would come out, didn’t you).


David Baldacci’s latest, The Escape (2014), is your average police procedural that’s been merged into one more by-the-numbers spy thriller. This one features Baldacci hero John Puller, making his third appearance (Zero Hour, The Forgotten). Writing in his military-hero mode, Baldacci has seen fit to litter the pages with acronyms and initialisms out the yin-yang in an apparent desire to seem authentic. That’s not to mention reference after reference to military demeanor and code of conduct. 

Even all that can’t really disguise a paper-thin plot, however, padded out with unlikely angles. For example, Puller (John) was “out of the country” when his brother was arrested, convicted and sentenced; and thus doesn’t even know the charges against Puller (Robert). Sorry, that’s pretty high on the far-fetched scale. Baldacci also ladles contrived twists and pink herrings (herrings that aren’t distracting enough to be red) over the text like greasy gravy.  There’s not much more in store for readers when it comes to the characters. Apparently hoping to make his protagonist less stereotypical, Baldacci equips Puller with a cat (AWOL) he takes with him on his investigation, though she only shows up a few times, perhaps because the author keeps forgetting about her. Puller also (like most people, to be sure) has a mother, but his disappeared when he was a child and the sensitive new-age guy misses her oh, so much! He’s also monogamous (serially), which is unusual for the hardboiled investigator trope, though not unknown. Yet no matter what Baldacci does to try to distinguish Puller from his protagonists like Oliver Stone and Shaw, he’s still hackneyed as all hell.

Ultimately The Escape, no matter all the gushy five-star reviews at Amazon, is merely one more mediocre thriller in a longline of mediocre thrillers by this writer, a tome whose best use is to provide buyers something to read while they’re waiting for a good novel to hit the shelves, ‘cause this ain’t it.