Daylight, David Baldacci

In 2018, the prolific David Baldacci began a series featuring FBI agent Atlee Pine, driven by her own personal history to bring as much justice into an unjust world as she can. At six, Atlee and her twin sister Mercy were terrorized by a kidnapper who took one girl but left the other behind. The crime destroyed her family and she now finds herself with her Arizona FBI field office as much of one as she can manage. In that book, Long Road to Mercy, clues set Atlee on the road that may help her actually find her sister and so far, a sympathetic superior has given her some room to purse the case instead of her normal work load.

2020's Daylight finds Atlee with a lead on the actual kidnapper, a man with mob ties and blood family still living in New Jersey. But when she tries to move in and question him, she finds herself disrupting a military police drug sting run by John Puller, himself the lead character in a Baldacci series. Atlee aids John because she blew his arrest and he aids her by calling in some favors with higher contacts. But both of them find themselves stymied when people at very high levels turn out to be interested in their cases -- and not because they want them solved. The pair have each other's backs and allies here and there, but beyond that there may not be anyone they can trust and the only answer offered to them may be of the final and fatal kind.

Baldacci has a good half-dozen series in his catalogue but he doesn't necessarily write them all at the same time. His most interesting one, the "Camels Club," had its last adventure so far a decade ago, and Sean King and Michelle Maxwell have been dormant since 2013.

Even so, Daylight seems very slapped together and a lot of its narrative reads as though it would have been revised, focused and better written if a deadline had been extended. Atlee's journey to find her sister takes a backseat to John's conspiracy storyline but is by far the most interesting. The long-ago kidnapping may have brought her into law enforcement, but now it drives her away from being able to think about anything else. A paint-by-numbers Conspiracy at the Highest Levels of Goverment pales (and bores) in comparison.

Baldacci is a serviceable stylist who writes action better than anything else even though he has a gift of bringing believable characters to life. Atlee finishes Daylight closer than she has ever been to finding Mercy, so there's reason to keep an eye out for the fourth in the series when it surfaces. But if Baldacci can't figure out a way to give her a longer storyline that stands on its own, then the resolution of her search will be all the reason readers need to let Atlee and friends move on -- on their own.