A Minute to Midnight - David Baldacci - 4 Stars

[Olivermagnus]

As the story opens, FBI agent Atlee Pine, six-foot-two and able to bench press 500 pounds, visits incarcerated serial killer Daniel James Tor. She suspects him as the man who kidnapped her twin sister and fractured her own skull 30 years earlier. He refuses to give her any help.

Frustrated, Pine leaves and immediately responds to an Amber Alert. Atlee tracks the pedophile who has seized a ten-year-old girl, and once she has the man overpowered, she continues to beat him, fracturing his skull.

Instead of firing or suspending Pine, her supervisor tells her to go back to Georgia and re-examine the disappearance of her twin thirty years earlier and try to get her life back on track.

Soon after she arrives, bodies begin appearing in her hometown. Is it a coincidence that as soon as she shows up a serial killer begins working? Or is it somehow improbably tied to the events of thirty years ago? Atlee starts remembering more details about her long-forgotten past, things that turn her investigation into a whole new direction. At some point, the two stories do intersect, and they reveal even more of the past.

There is something that prevents me from connecting with this character, but her relationship with Carol remains a highlight for me. Carol is the one with whom Atlee shares everything first, and who is her sounding board as she investigates her family’s past.

While not my favorite Baldacci series, events toward the end of the book have me almost eagerly anticipating the next book in the series, coming out in November.