One of the hundred books a year I read:

Book 24 on my “March to 100 for 2019″—David Baldacci: Zero Day—An Army criminal investigator searches for the murder of a military officer in coal country.

An Army Colonel with the Defense Intelligence Agency is found brutally murdered along with his family in a small town in the heart of coal country, West Virginia. The military orders Warrant Officer John Puller of the Criminal Investigation Division to assist the local police department.

The crime scene communicates the sophistication of the killers, but that raises more questions than answers? Was the murder because of the officer’s intelligence role? A drug war killing by organized crime? An attempt to hide illegal corporate behavior by the local coal company? Or something not yet identified with much darker implications?

As Baldacci has done before, part of the story centers on the effects of the coal industry on the Appalachia. The jobs are desperately needed in a part of the country that has few other economic options, but the toll is heavy on the health of the workers and on the environment.

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