Book Talk: David Baldacci, ‘Simply Lies’

“Mickey Gibson wiped the spit-up off Darby’s face, and then gave her two-year-old daughter a plastic squeaky ball, hoping that would hold her attention for a bit.” Although the books that she’d read claimed that toddlers were old enough to entertain themselves, she lifted 3-year-old Tommy onto her hip in order to stop him from strangling her legs. In considering the “expert” advice, Mickey thought, “Whoever wrote that was on drugs, or else my kids have no future as adults.”

Such is the life of a single mom with an infant and a toddler. But Mickey is no ordinary single mom, if there is such a thing. She was an outstanding basketball player in high school, an ex-cop who rose to the position of detective with the Philadelphia police department, and now a tracker of billions of dollars hidden by criminals in offshore accounts beneath layers of shell companies and in other devious places.

She works from home on her computers and specialty software from her employer, ProEye, where she is the star investigator. Her job is to track down crooks and recover whatever they’ve stolen. She’s good at the job but was terrible at choosing a mate. When they married, her husband said that he wanted a big family, and they started out by having back-to-back babies. However, when the “Daddy-Do” list began to ruin his weekends, he bugged out. But, so far, she’s been able to juggle the various elements of her life. Then a phone call changed everything.