David Baldacci

But that just heightened the tension of the whole story.

absolutely is because the end of the day i mean you you bring people in you arrest them they're going to prosecute them and not just that you have to convict them if you don't you know they walk away and double jeopardy attaches and goodbye you know they go on with their life so i i needed to give that you know throughout you know the fbi agent and nash is not a lawyer he has no clue about any of that stuff he's a businessman he knows some stuff but he's dealing with the fbi and the fbi is telling him you know this is how we have to do it this is how the evidence we have to collect we have to be careful about how it's collected or else it's not going to be admissible in court

And Nash, you know, he really doesn't want to hear that.

He just wants to get through the day, you know, each day.

So he's living under a different set of pressures than the FBI.

But also at the end, you have to realize that there's a legal process or the rule of law in this country.

And if you're going to successfully prosecute someone, you have to dot the I's and cross the T's.

If you don't, it was all for nothing.

I do that all the time.

And I'll, I'll give you another football analogy.

I like to think that I write in the trenches.

I've tried to write from outline.

Never anything that I put in the outline actually ends up in the book.

It's just a waste of time for me.

It works for some writers.

It doesn't work for me.

I like to write in the trenches.

What's that?

Exactly right.

And when you, when you read, you're reading the novel and you go, wow, I didn't know that Nash was going to go in that direction.