Book Review: Last Man Standing

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

Last Man Standing     Amazon US PB Amazon US HC Amazon Canada PB Amazon Canada HC
David Baldacci
Class/Genre:   Mystery
Warner, Nov 2001, $26.95, 548 pp.

Web London leads his elite FBI Hostage Rescue Team on the raid of the drug operation, but the enemy is waiting fully armed with remote electronic modern weaponry. Web’s team is wiped out with he the lone survivor. Washington DC Field Office Chief Buck Winters, a key contributor to the Waco fiasco, blames Web for causing a media nightmare. Web’s peers and the family members of the dead want answers on why Web lived.

Web knows he is the fall guy for this fiasco, but is determined not to just prove his innocence, but learn how his team was set up because this was a high tech precision operation that required a FBI leak to succeed. Web knows that one other witness besides the remote ambushers survived the assault. A ten-year-old boy named Kevin happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He also needs to determine why the other side left him as the LAST MAN STANDING. This trail will lead to some personal revelations that will shake Web to the core of his being.

LAST MAN STANDING is an exciting psychological police thriller that contains two interrelated story lines in which separately either one is very powerful, but collectively one takes away from the other. Readers will empathize with Web who in seconds horrifically observed his team eradicated and feel for family survivors. David Baldacci furbishes an exciting thriller that never slows down even as the tale meanders between the twin plots. Still, readers will enjoy this fast-paced different type of psychological police procedural.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner