Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsA new series for fans of Baldacci
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 9, 2022
I, like many others who reviewed David Baldacci’s “One Good Deed,” suspected that Aloysius Archer, the protagonist, would be the key character in a new Baldacci series. No sooner had I filed my column than the second Archer book arrived at my door. Like the first book, “A Gambling Man” is set in post-World-War-II America. But Archer has traveled from Poca City where he was released from prison to Reno, “The Biggest Little City in the World,” and then Las Vegas, where he hooks up with Liberty Callahan, a showgirl who has aspirations of becoming a movie star.
Archer is on his way to Bay City, CA, to become an apprentice private eye. After Callahan saves his life, he decides to give her a ride, at least most of the way to Hollywood. Because Archer has won a good sum of money by “not gambling” at craps and roulette, they travel in style in a 1939 Delahaye Model One Sixty-Five, Figoni and Falashi convertible cabriolet. (Do yourself a favor and Google this magnificent French-made automobile.)
Archer’s goal is to hook up with Willie Dash, Very Private Investigations, a former FBI agent who was recommended by Lieutenant Detective Irwin Shaw, back in Poca City. Although Liberty Callahan’s goal was to get to Hollywood and become a movie star, she forms a friendship, laced with a bit of sexual tension, with Archer and takes a job singing at a local nightclub.
Liberty is an immediate smash hit, but Archer has a lot to learn from Dash, and he needs to learn quickly because he finds himself in the middle of a case, the intricacies of which reminded me a bit of the 1974 movie “Chinatown,” starring Jack Nicholson. Specifically, Archer has to tread carefully as he investigates a case that involves power, politics, corruption, and a mysterious bit of family intrigue.
Bay City is run by a wealthy man, Sawyer Armstrong, whose son-in-law, Douglas Kemper, is running for mayor. But Armstrong is not only wealthy, he seems to own outright or have a financial interest in virtually everything that has value. Archer becomes involved with the family when Kemper comes to him for help because he’s being blackmailed.
Just when the reader begins to wonder if Archer is a kind of superman, like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, he is soundly beaten by Armstrong’s strong-arm henchmen Hank and Tony. But Liberty sticks with Archer through thick and thin. P.I. Willie Dash seems to have an advisory role, at least until he shows up with a machine gun that he claims to have taken “from Ma Barker’s cold, dead hands.” Still, it’s wonderful to listen to Archer and Dash sift through clues together and formulate hypotheses.
Like the first book in this new Baldacci series, A Gambling Man takes us back to a time that most people will recognize through the novels by Ross McDonald, Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler.
...Jim Glynn
