I'm Ann Bocock and welcome to "Between the Covers".

David Baldacci is an international number 1 bestselling author.

He's published more than 40 novels in 45 languages and with 150 million copies worldwide, that includes some of his most popular series, John Puller, The Camel Club and King and Maxwell.

Several of his books have been adapted for television and film.

He's also published novels for young readers and along with his wife, he is the co-founder of the Wish You Well Foundation, a non-profit supporting literacy across America.

He has a new book in the Atlee Pine thriller series, The title is "Mercy".

David Baldacci, thank you so much for being here.

Hey, it's great to be here, thank you very much.

I can't wait to get into the new book.

It's called "Mercy", this is the fourth Atlee Pine book.

Now Atlee is an FBI agent and briefly 30 years ago, her twin sister Mercy, was kidnapped from their family home.

So take it from here if you can, who is Atlee?

This is the fourth book with Atlee.

So yeah, Atlee Pine, she's been an FBI agent for a number of years.

She's stationed in Arizona in the Grand Canyon area.

In the first novel, "Long Road to Mercy", she solves a case and...

But she understands she has a lot of personal baggage.

She comes to the decision that for her to move forward with her life, she's got to have closure on her sister's whereabouts, is she alive or is she dead?

So she goes on an odyssey with her assistant, Carol Blum through the book "Midnight", then third novel "Daylight", and then it culminates in "Mercy" to find her sister, but she understands she can't move forward in her life until she has closure about Mercy.

And so, everything is directed towards finding out what happened to her sister, is she alive or is she dead?

Well, we find out in the book, the female characters, all of your female characters are these really powerful, strong women.

So there are no damsels in distress in your book.

And tell me about writing strong women and writing from a woman's point of view.

So I grew up surrounded by strong female role-models, both of my paternal and maternal grandmother lived with us for the last 10 years of their life.

My mother was a force of nature.

She grew up in the middle of coal country in Dickenson County, Virginia.

It's the poorest and the youngest county in Virginia.

She lived, she grew up in a place called Ramsey's Ridge.

In 2004, "Washington Post" wrote an article about it.

The only thing noteworthy about it was in 2004, they finally found water, electricity and running water through Ramsey's Ridge in 2004.

My mom grew up there in the thirties and forties, the youngest of 10 kids.

I married a very strong, independent woman.

We raised a very strong independent daughter and that's really all my whole experience had been that way.

Again, I know no damsels in distress.

And so, I'm comfortable writing about women, because I've been watching and observing and living with them across many levels, many degrees, most of my life.

And so, when it comes down to creating this type of character, particularly women in law enforcement, which is a much, still a much a male-dominated arena, I know a lot of women who work for the FBI and the secret service and different agencies, and they have to work three times as hard to get to the same level, that's mad, it's just the way the playing field is tilted.

Which actually comes out in the book, because Atlee does have to work twice, three times as hard as the men to get where she is.

We learned pretty quickly that Mercy is alive, she's living under a different name, and I'm not spoiling anything for anyone who hasn't read the book yet, because this comes out really fast.

Mercy she's working as a security guard and a part-time MMA fighter.

Now, honestly, you don't get any tougher than this.

So I kinda wanna know about how you wrote this, how you researched these fight scenes?

This is brutal.

Yeah, I played football, I wrestled at high school, I wrestled at college.

I did Greco-Roman wrestling as well, and went to a lot of tournaments across the country.

So I've used to really hand-to-hand style kind of combat and one-on-one and Mercy's character wasn't gratuitous why I made her the way she was.

She doesn't wanna have any close friends, 'cause she's worried about being discovered.

She wants to be self-sufficient.

She's tall and rangy and strong.

So she wanted to use those attributes as well to earn money.

And one of the ways in our society whether you like it or not, is to use your body for the way to make money.

And with her being athletic and strong and all that, the UFC, the MMA was the route to go.

She can make up to $1,000 a night in a fight if she wins.

And for her that's really, really good money, but it also represents that she's a loner and she relies on her strength in order to survive.

And I didn't think there could be any better way to symbolize that and to have her literally fighting for her survival.

Now, I don't know, and you don't have to answer, I don't know if this is the final book in the Atlee Pine series, but I'm reading this book and I'm thinking there could be an actually another character that comes out of this that maybe could have her own book.

Yes, it was.

And I was thinking about that when I created that character who's also complicated, this is sort of in the gray area, which is the world I live in, neither black, nor white, and a number of people have said the same thing to me, she seems to be really, really intriguing.

And even though she's not a peripheral character, she's pretty integral.

She's not a major character on the same level of the two Pine sisters, but oh yeah, she's in my back pocket.

I know she's there.

Oh, good, good.

Okay.

You are so darn good at descriptions.

I mean, I'm reading this, I'm actually feeling what you're describing and case in point, here is Mercy, in the beginning of the book, she's thinking about her young life when she was kidnapped.

And I wonder if you would treat us to reading part of this.

She talks about how she didn't have the fairytale Cinderella life.

And if you could kind of pick it up from there.

Absolutely.

"She grew tall, very tall.

Her parents must've been tall, she couldn't remember.

In her life it had made her strong.

She could lift a truck and she possessed stamina out the roof, able to work for days and not feel it, not an ounce of fat was on her frame, because they fed her just enough to keep her hungry.

And her pain tolerance, which she'd endured tonight, it was painful for sure, but nothing really compared to what she'd endured in the past.

Desiree had really liked to burn dogs, cats, but mostly Elle, her.

And mentally, she was stronger than she otherwise ever would have been.

Every day the same, first, the logroom of a house, then her final destination was a little prison in the woods another fairytale with a monster attached.

The chain, the smell of rotting clay.

She stayed focused on her mind surviving.

Played the mental games required not to lose her sanity.

She obsessed over mundane stuff, so she could totally bury the absurdity of her current existence in the black hole of her mind while she doted over minutiae, the counting of seconds, the drip of water, the arrangement of her ragged clothes and her grimy shelves, the cleaning of dishes, the fixation on just where to place the first cut on a tree lamp or the siding of a fawn, that drove her to tears or the spying of a hawk, enjoying the lift of air currents along with the best view in the county, a bird with more freedom than she had.

Each day she was alive to see the sunrise and then fall, was an enormous victory.

It truly was the little things, particularly when all the big things had been denied you.

The long days and nights of labor, the knock knock on the door for two daily meals, her with the food, him eventually, with the gun, because she'd grown far bigger than both of them.

They were afraid of her.

She could see that in their wide eyes and how Joe clutched the weapon, how the vein in his temple bulged with that door, that damned door stayed open, never seeing another living soul except the scaredy cat Joe and the bug-eyed and vicious Desiree.

And occasionally Lynn and Wanda, it would come with sad eyes and Lee with sadder ones.

Cain had passed from terrified kid, the cool-eyed adult.

She was a prisoner, even though she'd never been tried and convicted of anything until that day came."

Thank you.

This is a little girl prisoner.

As a reader, as a mother, it was a really hard to read this.

And as I said, your descriptions are so good.

So that begs the question, how are you so good?

Are you a careful observer of people?

Do people tell you things?

Do you make mental notes?

How do you do research on something like that?

I think the one attribute that every writer needs to have, they need to be ever, forever curious about life and the world.

So, when I was a kid, I was the kid on our neighborhood, designated to come up with all of our adventures we would have after school and during the summer, the battles we would fight, the odysseys we would take, the journeys we were on.

It was kind of fun stuff for me to just create the stuff out of nothing.

And I was sort of a "Harriet the Spy" type, when I was a kid, I eavesdropped on conversations, I loved to watch people and that's continued my whole life.

So writers need to be curious about life.

So I go out every day and people ask, "Where do you get your ideas?"

I wake up every day, I walk out the door and I learned something that day that I didn't know the day before.

So I'm a voracious reader, I sift through information from all corners.

I feel like the more you know about lots of different subjects, and all of a sudden you can take elements from those different thought pots and start weaving original stories together.

So for me, it's all about not staring at my cellphone when I'm walking down the street, but just watching people.

I love seeing how they interact, how they talk, how they don't talk to each other, how they move, how they get on a bus, guy gets on a bus with a package.

I wonder where he's going, what's in the package?

You're asking yourself questions.

And then, in the story, answering those questions.

And when I go out and research, I talk to lots of people.

I become a journalist.

I asked good questions.

I listen, listening is a really lost art.

It's a lost art.

And it is a great trait to have.

David, you have had tremendous success, no question, a worldwide following.

So the story is that you write this first book, you hit it out of the park, it's an overnight success, is that true?

Yeah, but it only took me 6,000 nights to get there.

So they don't know about the years and years of running short stories and trying to get them published, trying to write screenplays and get those on the screen and trying to struggle through a first novel.

It took three years, because I was writing full-time.

I was working full-time as a trial lawyer in Washington, DC.

But every writer who's made it through that gauntlet, has the same sort of story to tell that I have.

They found time to write, either early in the morning and late at night, they're working full-time, they have to make a living and they can't make a living off the writing or trying to learn their craft in fits and starts, rejections and a little bit of hope here and there keeps you going.

So it's not so much different from other writers' journeys that they've taken.

This is a craft.

It's not anything you're ever gonna master.

You're gonna be an apprentice for life and all you can help do with every story, every book is trying to get a little bit better than your were before.

But it also didn't hurt that the book "Absolute Power" was a best seller than a hit movie with Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman.

That's pretty darn good.

All the moons were in alignment on that one.

Let me tell you that was a lot of work in Hollywood, And I've had a bunch of stuff done, a bunch of stuff not done.

And that is very unusual all things like that to come together the way they did.

It's not usually how it works out.

I'm glad it worked that way, so for you.

You just said you were a trial attorney.

So if what I understand, you were like most attorneys who become successful writers, they are the lawyer during the day and the writer at night, which means you're probably never sleeping, but I'm guessing that law may have been a good foundation, was it?

Well, look, I been friends with Scott Turow and John Grisham for years, another, Lisa Scottoline, lawyers turned writer.

And so, as a lawyer, all I had in my quiver were words.

Those are my chief tools, my chief weapons.

Either I was writing a brief, I was speaking them orally in your court in front of a judge or a jury.

And it made you think about building a story.

I like to say tongue in cheek, some of the best fiction I ever wrote was when I was a lawyer.

I had the same set of facts as the other side.

And I ended up with a story that was diametrically opposed to what they were arguing.

So words are really important to me.

I remember writing a brief about a long arm jurisdiction case in Texas, where we were trying to get somebody sued in Texas, and they say they didn't have enough presence or connection to Texas that we couldn't sue them there.

And I wrote the brief, an agonized over the verb to use, and finally decided to use the verb, flitted.

I said, "There was no justice in this, in this defendant being able to flip in and out of the great state of Texas in order to avoid consequences of misdeeds, they've committed in the state."

And I know that word really resonated with the judge, because we won that case, we won that order and we issued the order.

He used the word flitting in his order.

So trust me, words do matter.

We're gonna put that on a bumper sticker.

Was there a day that you said, "Yes, I can give up law.

I'm gonna write full-time,"?

Well, I sold the rights to "Absolute Power".

Nobody at my law firm knew I was writing anything.

So after I got the news the book had sold at auction for an enormous amount of money, I had to go on, keep on working.

So I remember I attended a luncheon that day about insurance regulations.

So I'm listening to this guy drone on and on about insurance regulations.

I had this super, silly quip that I'm just dying to tell.

All I wanted to do was jump on the table and do the electric slide all the way down on the table, that's all I wanted to do.

But so, the movie rights sold international rights sold.

There was just an enormous amount of money.

People I didn't even know were chucking checks at me as fast as they possibly could.

My wife and I sat down, we had one child at that time, another one on the way.

And I said, "I'm gonna keep working as a lawyer until this new book is just about to come out."

I'm gonna see, I'm writing my next book too.

I didn't even know "Absolute Power" was going to sell.

I'd already started my second novel.

And I said, "As we get closer to publication, I really think I can build a career as a writer.

And if I can't, I'll fall on my face, I can always go back to being a lawyer.

I've got good skills and good reputation."

So it was probably around April of 1995, around that time that I left the practice of law, my book was published in January the next year.

And I haven't looked back, 50 books and counting.

50 Books and counting.

When I open your books and it's like, I want to say, it's hitting the ground running, because it's so action-packed, but that really doesn't even do it justice.

There is an adrenaline rush.

So I'm curious, when you're writing a series, especially, do you see the characters evolving from book to book and do you look at new characters as in a particular book as, "Oh, maybe I have another series,"?

That happens all the time to me.

There's no reason to bring a character back in a new book, in a series if it's just to investigate another mystery.

I mean, some writers do that, but I don't think it's a compelling enough reason for me.

So like an Amos Decker, every book that he's in, you peel more layers off the onion for him, new things, new revelations about to come, you learn more than you knew in the last book.

So for me, it's always about the case he has to solve, but also about who the man is underneath.

And I'm working on new Amos Decker book right now.

And you're gonna learn a lot more about him, and I'm putting him through a lot more change in his life, which he hates, absolutely hates.

So for me, it's all about the evolution of the character, as well as whatever mystery they're supposed to be investigating.

And then sometimes, when I'm writing a novel and I see a character over there on the periphery and all of a sudden they start to grow, loom a little bit larger because I think we're interesting, and I'm gonna bring them in more into the story, then my mind sort of goes, ding, maybe that's a possible series character down the road that I can bring back, that always happens.

I love this series, because I feel like it's peeling back the layers of an onion as I get to know a particular character better.

And there is action, there's excitement in your books.

There's also authenticity.

And for some reason, we gravitate to these stories that have violence and murder and evil.

So you're writing them.

Why do we have this fascination?

I like to call it the safe scare mentality.

When you're a little kid, you're afraid of the boogeyman, you don't wanna look under the bed or look in the closet, but you do, because you're more fascinated than you are scared.

So when we grow up, we don't really lose that at all.

We have this fascination with say, for instance, serial killers, nobody in their right mind would want to meet Ted Bundy, not even in a dark alley, but in the middle of a football stadium, nobody would want that.

But do we wanna read about somebody like that from a safe distance?

Yeah, because we're fascinated with...

There, but for the grace of a couple of chromosomes go, "I," so you wanna know what made that person a monster?

What makes that person tick?

How can they do those sorts of things?

It's just an enate fascination with humanity really at all levels.

That's why I call it the safe scare, where people wanna know about these things without ever meeting them or experiencing them in real life.

It's the scare, but from a safe distance.

I love being scared from a safe distance.

Thank you for that.

Do you always know how the story is going to end?

And I mean, when you sit down at the end, and I am assuming computer, do you know right then and there, how it's ending?

Never, I never know the ending of a novel before I start it.

I know a lot of my friends they outline everything and then they sit down and write the novel.

I've tried that, it never worked for me, nothing I ever put in the outline ends up in the novel.

So it was sort of a waste of time for me.

I gave the analogy of, if you wanna learn how to drive a Formula One race car, you can do it a couple of ways.

You can take a class and read a book or you can drive a Formula One race car, and they're totally different experiences.

So when you write the outline, you're not engaged with the characters yet.

They're really not doing anything other than, here's what's gonna happen with this chapter and all that.

So there's no sense of urgency, there's no sense of like, "Oh my God, this decision really matters."

But when you're writing the novel and we're in the middle of a very dangerous situation, it's almost the difference between planning for a battle and actually fighting the battle, because when you're immersed in the transition and things are happening to your character, we have to make decisions, it's almost like everything slows down, your mind has great clarity and you see everything.

It's like, Tom Brady dropping back for a path.

He sees every person on the field, all 22 players, including himself, all the sight lines, all the passing lines, all the defensive ends coming around to wreck him, everything.

The spot where he's gonna throw the ball as soon as the receiver turns towards it.

That's for me, is where the storytelling really comes in.

My mind moves at a different level.

My synapses are firing off in a much greater velocity and I'd see everything, I never would during the drafting an outline.

It takes me 50 pages just to understand who my characters are, much less trying to create them and have a connection with them in an outline.

So for me, it's very much an organic process.

That makes me feel so good to know that that's how you write.

I mean, it makes me just appreciate it even more.

There is a nod to libraries in "Mercy", and I have to say libraries hold a very special place in my heart.

Elle, who has had very little formal schooling, learns through librarians, which I love that you did that.

Do you have a personal connection to libraries?

Library's really saved my life and they changed who I am.

I grew up in Richmond, Virginia in the sixties and seventies, they're a heavily segregated society.

I grew up with a lot of people whose opinions and perspectives in life had been changed since that time.

I never had a chance to travel.

Mark Twain had a very famous quote.

I'm on the board of the Mark Twain House.

I've been a Twainiac most of my life.

The quote was, he was the most traveled man of his generation.

He traveled the world on his speaking engagements.

The quote is, "Travel is fatal to prejudice."

I would modify it slightly to saying, "There are many ways to travel."

I traveled not physically, but I traveled through books at the library.

I went to the library and I learned about people that looked like me, dressed like me, speaked like me, prayed like me, but I learned that we all had a common core of humanity and it made me more empathetic, more tolerant, more understanding, less opinionated.

And it made me just a better person.

Librarians that I go to in Richmond, Virginia, they all knew me and my brother and sister.

They would let me check out more books than would others do, because they knew I read them all and come back the next day or the next week for more.

So books really allowed me to become the person who I am.

And I will tell you that if more people went to the library and more people read books, what a far better world we would have.

I totally agree with you.

And it was only a small part in the book that that Elle does this, but boy did, did it.

It just hit me just really right.

You yourself have long-supported libraries and literacy efforts through your Foundation, Wish You Well.

And I would love if you could tell me about that.

So this is actually our 20th year.

My wife and I founded it 20 years ago.

When I first started out on the own publicity tours, a lot of my ventures sponsored by libraries, rent the library, literacy organizations.

So I got a crash course over the years about how bad the illiteracy problem is in the United States.

We're about half the adult population.

And I'm not talking about all ESLs, I'm talking about Native Americans, about half the adult population read at the two lowest levels of literacy, 50 or 60 million are functioning illiterate.

Another 50 or 60 million would be hard-pressed to read a grocery list.

So reading for me is the same verb, to read is the same verb to think.

You can't do one without the other.

How can you decide things if you can't process information, if you can't read information and process it in your head and make the decision?

So it's not just about reading the next Baldacci book on the beach.

It's about being an active participant in a democracy.

How do you make the decisions at the voting booth if you don't know the issue?

Now, our world now is filled with more disinformation than I have ever seen in my entire life.

And the people who are not well-read, the people who don't read at all are much more likely, and I'm not saying this myself, and study after study has proven that are much more likely to fall victim to this information campaigns and to be fed lies.

So for me, this is how we maintain a democracy, if people are well-educated, well-read, lots of good things happen, if they're not, lots of bad things happen.

Wish You Well is the name of your foundation, it's also the title of this beautiful book that you wrote as a standalone, and I believe it is, it's your mother's story.

And we talked a tiny bit about this in the beginning of this show, but these were stories that she remembered from her childhood, is that true?

She grew up in the middle of coal mining country in Southwest Virginia, the youngest of 10, and very hard to grow up alone.

And I visited her whole homestead many times when I was a kid on top of the mountain, most remote hairpin curve, never wanna drive up there.

My dad was a big, strong guy and we got to the bottom of the mountain to go from my mom's house, she had to drive, he was too scared to drive it, because it was like one lane, hairpin turn, 3,000-foot drop, and she drove up there like it was, she was in the middle of a six-lane highway in Los Angeles.

So the story was really about how she grew up.

The story itself was fictionalized.

I actually adapted the screenplay for film.

It starred Ellen Burstyn and Josh Lucas.

And I remember interviewing my mother for this.

I wanted her to tell me about her life 50 years before, right?

And she recounted it in such vivid detail.

I finally had to ask her, "Mom, I can't even remember what I had for lunch yesterday.

How do you remember these things in such incredible detail, half a century later?"

And her answer was simple, but right to the point, she said, "Honey, when you grow up like that, you can never forget."

And that was the answer, and she was right.

And interviewing her allowed me to write about that way of life, the way of life that happened when I wasn't even born, in such authentic and vivid detail.

And I owe that my mom's memory and her recollection, which was just spot on.

Thank you.

The latest book, "Mercy" is a thrill ride, David Baldacci.

This has been such a pleasure.

I can't wait for the next book.

So congratulations on the work that you and Michelle do with the Wish You Well Foundation.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you, I enjoyed it.

I'm Ann Bocock, please connect with us.

You can listen to our podcast, "GO Between the Covers", wherever you get your podcasts and join us on the next "Between the Covers".