David Baldacci is a prolific author. I have read and reported here on 13 of his books. I have probably read a few more that I didn’t report on here. But he has probably written more than 50 novels in all, so I still have a few to go. And I will keep reading his books because they are damn good.
One Good Deed is the first of one of his shorter series – just 3 books, as of now, in the series featuring Aloysius Archer, an ex-con and World War II infantryman. This book is set in 1949 in Poca City, a dusty prairie town somewhere near – but not in – Texas. Maybe Oklahoma? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is a town which has suffered 6 years of drought, has a pig slaugherhouse that is about the only place where an ex-con can get a job, has a guy named Hank Pittleman who owns the slaughterhouse, the bank, the hotel and just about the entire town and a rancher named Lucas Tuttle who owed Pittleman $5000 and who put up a 1947 Cadillac as collateral. The town also has a very attractive parole officer, Ernestine Crabtree, and an equally attractive daughter of Tutlle, Jackie, who has become Pittleman’s “chattel.”
There are a few other characters who get introduced along the way – another ex-con who is willing to murder for a buck, a state cop who gets involved when people start dying, Pittleman’s wife and several of the hired help at both Pittleman’s mansion and Tuttle’s ranch. It is a rich set of characters and some pretty interesting settings, too, including the Cat’s Meow, Poca City’s main watering hole and yet another of Pittleman’s businesses. That is where Archer first meets Pittleman and Jackie. Pittleman hires Archer to collect the debt from Tuttle. As Archer soon discovers, that isn’t going to be easy because Tuttle’s condition for repaying the debt is the return of his daughter – and she refuses to return. It is also complicated by Tuttle burning the Cadillac, making recovery of the collateral impossible. So Archer is faced with the possibility that he will have to go to work in the slaugherhouse to earn money to keep his hotel room and to repay the $40 advanced to him by Pittleman. He eventually does go to work there, but only for a short time and only after sleeping with Jackie, taking up temporary residence in Ernestine’s house and being suspected of murdering Pittleman who turns up dead in his room just down the hall from Archer’s the night he beds Jackie.
It certainly looks like Archer will be headed back to prison, possibly to hang, except that the detective, Shaw, believes that Archer is innocent and that Archer has the instincts to become a detective. They team up to solve the murder of Pittleman and several others that follow.
I initially wasn’t eager to read this book as I much prefer contemporary stories to period pieces like this one. But, as always, Baldacci charmed me and completely drew me in to this complex story and these fascinating characters.
I am a bit puzzled by the title, though. What was the “one good deed?” That was lost on me.
8 out of 10.