A high-flying financier learns he’s working for crooks. Everything goes wrong. Eventually.

When Walter Nash is recruited by the FBI to help bring down a global crime network his life is turned completely upside down…

Walter Nash is a sensitive, intelligent and kindhearted man. He has a wife and a daughter and a very high-level position at Sybaritic Investments, where his innate skills and dogged tenacity have carried him to the top of the pyramid in his business career. Despite never going on grand adventures, and always working too many hours, he has a happy and upscale life with his family.

However, following his estranged Vietnam-veteran father’s funeral, Nash is unexpectedly approached by the FBI in the middle of the night. They have an important request: become their inside man to expose an enterprise that is laundering large sums of money through Sybaritic. At the top of this illegal operation is Victoria Steers, an international criminal mastermind that the FBI has been trying to bring down for years.

Nash has little choice but to accept the FBI’s demands and try to bring Steers and her partners to justice. But when Steers discovers that Nash is working with the FBI, she turns the tables on him in a way he never could have contemplated. And that forces Nash to take the ultimate step both to survive and to take his revenge: He must become the exact opposite of who he has always been.

And even that may not be enough.

In his latest novel, David Baldacci introduces readers to another new protagonist: Walter Nash, financier extraordinaire. With an intriguing premise, I jumped in with my usual expectations for Baldacci’s work. However, it was also nowhere near the author’s best.

Walter Nash is one of the stars of Sybaritic Investments. He has an apparently ideal life: millions in the bank, an attractive wife, a bright teenage daughter (currently toying with the ambition of becoming an influencer), and a multi-million dollar house. His life is secure, safe, and everyone knows him as the “Eagle Scout” — especially his wife, who appears to find him just a bit boring. After his estranged father’s funeral, during which he is humiliated by his father’s best friend, he is approached by an FBI agent who claims his employer is crooked to the core. What follows is Nash’s negotiation with the Bureau to come on board as an informant/spy, but also the protagonist’s discovery of just how rotten Sybaritic Investments actually is. We learn a little bit, also, about other key players in this drama and criminal enterprise. And, of course, then the total collapse of his life at the hands of some brutal villains.

I’ve been a fan of Baldacci’s novels for a long time. He’s a prolific author — more so as the years have passed — and not all of his books have been great, but they’re usually engaging and interesting reads. His Camel Club series is, in my opinion, his best (I haven’t read had the chance to read his Atlee Pine and Aloysius Archer series, but they also sound pretty good). When I read the synopsis for Nash Falls, I thought it had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the author hasn’t managed to pull this one off as well as many of his previous novels.

The characters weren’t particularly well-drawn — in fact, most of them are rather two-dimensional, their actions predictable and offered few surprises or hidden depths. “Shock”, Nash’s father’s best friend, was probably meant to be, well, what his nickname is. But ultimately his role in the story felt obvious and predictable. Nash himself is rather boring, which is probably an asset when it comes to picking a potential spy. Baldacci’s approach to him, however, is rather uninspired — readers are more-often told who he is, rather than shown. Certain characters’ actions and reactions are rather strange; too quickly accepting new information, and changing their allegiances, regardless of whether it flies in the face of what they have known for decades.

The plot is unbalanced: Nash’s father’s funeral and the initial approach by the FBI happens almost immediately, but then it’s followed by a long investigation into the firm and Nash’s negotiations with the Bureau. There are long passages that feel like info-dumping. (Baldacci has not, in this novel, followed Stephen King’s rule of keeping one’s research invisible from the reader.) When I started reading this, the author’s publishers had not yet announced the sequel, Hope Rises, which is out in April 2026 — now that they have, it’s clear this was planned as a duology (it ends on a cliffhanger). But, Nash Falls still feels uneven and inexpertly structured. That, actually, is maybe the best way to describe this novel: “inexpert”. For an author who has so many books under his belt, not to mention the majority of which are international bestsellers, this did not feel like it was written by an experienced author. If it had an unknown’s name on it, I might have been more forgiving of the many “mistakes” the author makes in terms of character, plot, and structure. It felt a little bit like Baldacci was going through the motions.

Sure, his prose and structure meant I blitzed through it; but it felt a bit like Baldacci was pulling a James Patterson (lots of very short chapters, perfectly designed to appeal to the “just one more chapter” impulse). After reading the first two-thirds in a single sitting, subsequent reading stretches slowed right down. Despite being well-paced on a prose-level, the writing was also just not good. At one point, I even wondered if Baldacci had actually written the book himself. The longer I read, I experienced something I never had before with a Baldacci novel: I kept reading just to get it finished. Not because I was desperate/keen to find out what was going to happen. Just to get it over with.

Will I be reading Hope Rises? Yes, probably. (I don’t like leaving stories unfinished.) But I do not have the same level of interest that I usually do for a new Baldacci novel, and I won’t be rushing to read it.

 *

David Baldacci’s Nash Falls is due to be published by Grand Central Publishing in North America (November 11th) and Macmillan in the UK (November 6th).

Also on CR: Reviews of The 6:20 Man, The Edge, To Die For, Stone Cold, The Whole Truth, Divine Justice, First Family, True Blue, Deliver Us From Evil, Hell’s Corner, The Innocent, The Hit, Bullseye, The Target, The Guilty, End Game, Memory Man

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Instagram, BlueSky
Review copy received via NetGalley