David Baldacci

And the older I get, the more books I write and the way the world is these days.

My message in these books is let's go back to being human beings again.

And if I can help you do that by showing that human beings are really, really complicated, but really, really fun to sort of take apart and see what makes them tick, it's a better way to spend your time than doom scrolling.

Yeah.

So Amos Decker, he was a, he's a detective.

He is a policeman.

So he chose that life and that profession.

Archer was a, he's a detective in LA in the fifties.

He chose that profession.

He chose that he wanted to live his life that way.

Walter Nash chose none of this.

You know, he didn't want any part of this world.

He was perfectly happy with the life that he had, but he was involuntarily thrust into this nightmare.

And then he had to try to make sense of it and then not just make sense of it.

He had to survive it.

And then on top of that, he had to avenge people that he really loved and cared about.

So for him, I threw him the most difficult challenge I've thrown any of my characters before.

Here's a guy who does not want to be in this book, but he's in the book and now he has to get to the end of it.

I wanted to let people say that you can play two dissimilar roles at the same time, you know, and people do that all the time.

I'm not just talking if you're a spy or not, but if you think about the course of your day and who you deal with and who you talk to throughout the day, you may become one person during the morning when you have to meet with a certain set of people.