David Baldacci may be one of the world’s best-selling authors, but he’s a lousy party guest. “I was at a party and somebody went up to my wife and said, ‘Is David ill? He’s just staring at the wall.’ And she glanced over and said, ‘He’s fine, he’s just finishing a chapter.’ If I have an off switch, I haven’t found it.”
Today, Baldacci has consented to leave his work for a while and talk to me over Zoom from his office in Reston, Virginia, although I’m not convinced that one hand isn’t polishing off another novel just out of sight of the camera. The rewards for his dedication to his craft have been ample: he is a regular number one bestseller in both the States and the UK, and worldwide sales of the library of crime novels he has published over the past three decades have passed 150 million copies.
