At a harbourside café one wet Sydney morning, a pair of rainbow lorikeets land on the next table, tear open the sugar packets with their beaks and eat only the raw brown kind, leaving the white sugar and the sweeteners untouched. Travis Devine, his face still swollen from a beating the night before, watches them with something close to envy. The birds know what is good for them. Nobody else in All In by David Baldacci seems to, least of all the man at the table, who has spent the previous evening shooting his way out of a kidnapping and the past decade refusing to call his parents.
David Baldacci Sends Devine South
The novel opens in a Manhattan thunderstorm, where a war correspondent is shot in the back and the intelligence analyst she has been quarrelling with is dragged into a van. Within days his body turns up in Sydney Harbour, chewed by sharks and propellers, and Devine follows it south. Everything about the investigation resists him. The analyst’s former colleagues will not discuss his work, the wealthy family he married into answer questions with questions, and evidence keeps being wiped, moved or killed before it can be used. When two imprisoned Russian arsonists hint that they might talk, they are transferred out of their high-security prison overnight, and it later emerges that a company owned by the dead man’s father-in-law runs the place.
All In by David Baldacci is the fourth Devine novel, after The 6:20 Man, The Edge and To Die For, and the first to take him out of the United States. Baldacci re-establishes the essentials quickly: the Army career that ended badly, the spell on Wall Street served as a kind of penance, the general who offered him a choice between government work and a military prison. Newcomers can start here without much loss.
The Partner Who Had Never Drawn Her Gun
The best decision in All In by David Baldacci is to give Devine an equal. Anais Jones, a detective sergeant in Sydney’s homicide squad, has spent more than a decade earning her place in a force where men still assume she has not, and she tells Devine early on that she has never had to draw her service pistol in the line of duty. By the final act that record is long gone, and the novel tracks the change in her without fuss.
Their rapport is built on small comic frictions: Devine wrestling a rental car on the wrong side of the road, Jones correcting his myth about water swirling backwards down Australian drains, the two of them arguing over whether billionaires deserve politeness. When she arranges an audience with the family patriarch without warning him, he assumes she has promised the man a briefing, and he is wrong. Baldacci lets the attraction between them simmer without ever turning it into a romance, which suits a book this busy.
A Family Richer Than Some Countries
The Woolwines are the novel’s weather system. Carlton, a self-made mining and technology magnate who prefers loafers without socks, lives alone in a hilltop compound with twenty bedrooms, rock-fed swimming pools and a fleet of initialled aircraft, and he greets two investigators with the mild impatience of a man unused to questions. His daughter Charlotte is harder to read: grieving, imperious, given to throwing her phone across rooms, and plainly hiding something. Baldacci is good on the texture of that kind of wealth, the way it buys silence from newspapers and patience from police, and All In by David Baldacci gets real tension from the question of whether a family this powerful can be investigated at all. The answer, when it comes, is more interesting than the obvious one, and it changes how the earlier scenes with father and daughter read.
The Son Who Kept Missing Calls
Running underneath the conspiracy is a quieter story that turns out to be the novel’s heart. Devine’s father, a retired Connecticut orthodontist who once mocked his son’s Ranger tab by comparing him to a forest-fire mascot, is in hospital with what may or may not be a stroke. His platelets keep falling and nobody can explain why. His mother may be losing her memory. And his older siblings, a surgeon and a corporate finance chief, have always been the favoured children.
In phone calls snatched between gunfights, Devine discovers how little he knew about his parents, including a war his father never mentioned. These scenes are written with more patience than anything in the investigation, and the payoff, which arrives through a letter, gives All In by David Baldacci an emotional weight the earlier books lacked.
Why All In by David Baldacci Talks Too Much
For all its momentum, the novel has a habit of stopping to make speeches. A former British intelligence officer, living off-grid in a Victorian country town with a landline and a pistol, delivers pages of fury about social media, surveillance capitalism and the billionaires building the future without asking anyone. A journalist later supplies a long primer on AI agents, and a billionaire’s daughter gives another on Chinese technology. Much of it is sharp and some of it is plainly the author’s own anxiety, but the threat at the centre of the book, a scheme involving the vast data centers Devine passes on the drive south, is described far more than it is ever dramatised. Several further habits weaken the second half:
The villain explains his motives at length to a captive hero, in a scene even Devine recognises as familiar.
Name-checks of current AI products and companies will date the novel quickly.
The final confrontation settles into a conventional siege that could belong to any thriller.
The violence is close and bloody throughout. The book deals with murder, kidnapping, torture, grief and terminal illness, and it describes several killings in detail.
David Baldacci, Behind the Book
David Baldacci and his wife, Michelle, run the Wish You Well Foundation, which funds adult literacy programmes in the United States, and he has long served as a trustee of the Mark Twain House in Hartford. Readers may spot the connection when Devine, walking the harbour after dinner, passes a plaque marking Twain’s visit to Australia and remembers reading Huckleberry Finn as a boy.
The acknowledgments of All In by David Baldacci reveal a nice piece of trivia: several characters, including the journalist, the murdered analyst, his wife and the family fixer, are named after winners of charity auctions who bid for the privilege. Baldacci also thanks his Australian publisher and a friend who helped with the technical material, admitting that any liberties taken are his own.
Readers who want more of Australia after this should try Last One Out by Jane Harper, which trades harbour glamour for a small community and a slower, deeper burn. Those who enjoy watching intelligence services obstruct their own investigations will find a darker, funnier version of that in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels.
After the Last Page
The conspiracy fades fast once the book is closed. What remains is a son reading a letter he never expected to receive, and a detective who has learned she can hold her nerve. All In by David Baldacci is fast, generous company and a solid step for the series, even if its biggest ideas never quite leave the conversation and make it onto the page.
The lorikeets had it right: take what nourishes you, leave the rest on the table.