First, there is a fairly large cast of characters in this one, so a mental scorecard is needed to keep track of everyone. Baldacci does a great job of snowballing Archer's situation, adding more and more nefarious villains as the book progresses.

Dream Town (2022) continues the journey of Baldacci's late 1940's/early 1950's hardboiled detective character Aloysius Archer who was introduced in One Good Deed (2019) with a follow-up in A Gambling Man (2021).Archer learns a little more about Lamb and her past, which includes rubbing elbows with some of the darker characters in town.

It makes for a very intriguing, and initially puzzling, investigation and certainly kept my interest levels high. Archer is soon in the thick of the action when on a visit to Eleanor Lamb’s house stumbles on a dead body and knocked unconscious. The LA setting is wonderfully described and made it easy to visualise all the exotic cars and the beautiful homes of the Hollywood stars. I was fascinated by the 1950s setting and the fantastic detailed descriptions - with all the allure and mystique of that decade.This was already my favorite of Baldacci's recurring series, and Dream Town only reinforces that, in large part because of Baldacci's brilliance in stitching his story across a tapestry of a bygone era of movie magic with a dark side. While there is little chance Aloysius will have any crossovers with characters in Baldacci’s other series, I see a lot of great possible interactions as the series progresses.

The novel starts off with a murder, and with seven people trapped on an isolated Greek island lashed by a "wild, unpredictable Greek wind. My other complaint relates to a specific writing style habit, which was something that really annoyed the heck out of me, and it got worse throughout the book.The enjoyed reading this book but alas all his books and plots are pretty much main stream and would love if author would bring anything new to the table. Another great story … But it’s the last in the series of Aloysius but the scene is set for his next adventure. David Baldacci is also the cofounder, along with his wife, of the Wish You Well Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting literacy efforts across America.

Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. While this book is part of a series, it's written as a standalone and you don't have to read the other books to enjoy this one.A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. The investigation takes him from mob-ridden Las Vegas to glamorous Hollywood to the darkest corners of Los Angeles—a city where beautiful faces belong to cutthroat schemers, cops can be more corrupt than criminals . I greatly enjoyed reading that change of pace set in the past, as well as Archer’s chivalrous character. And then things get truly dangerous as it becomes uncertain whether Archer will be able to manage to escape with his life. The book shines a light on the darker side of Hollywood and fame during that time period, particularly the studio contracts that used to bind actors to studios and dictate pretty much their whole life, which I've read about in other books and was pretty awful to women.