Just as I was becoming firmly addicted to the flamboyantly flawed lawyer Jason Rich, Bailey has published “Boomerang,” a stand-alone. “Boomerang” is 402 pages and I read it in three days. It is, as advertised, a thriller and a page turner and whatever other term you like for a great read.
It begins, quietly enough, on a baseball field in Lick Skillet, Alabama, on July 4, 1994. Two teenage boys, best friends, are discussing their present lives and future plans. They will move to Tuscaloosa to college, then law school, then politics, and Eli James as political advisor will guide Lionel Jefferson Cantrell’s career all the way to the White House where Eli will be Chief of Staff.
And it came to pass. In 2024, drinking a fine bourbon, they toast one another in the Oval Office: “We’ve come a long way from Jackie’s Lounge in Tuscaloosa.” We learn that along the way, there were a lot of tricky semi-ethical maneuvers. Eli and Lionel are not saints. Politics, as Mr. Dooley told us long ago, “ain’t beanbag.”
All pols have secrets and they have a big one: Lionel has cancer and two years to live. But, the intelligence community, headed by General Kyle Randolph, already knows EVERYTHING, including this shocker: there is a cure, kept secret from the American people for many years lest it disrupt the oncology industry and upset the stock market. Many rich people would lose money. The reader pauses: what if this were true!
Lionel is secretly given the cure, codenamed Boomerang, but then Bella, Eli’s daughter, a splendid, vivacious, beautiful teenage dancer and soccer player, is diagnosed as terminal. Eli will do anything to save his daughter, and the action begins. He interrogates lobbyists, especially from pharma, and becomes, as many do, an expert on cancer centers and experimental treatments, and turns up clues: there may be a cure.
With the help of his retired physician father and brilliant detective mother, Eli follows clues leading him to Mobile, Biloxi, Fairhope, and farmers’ markets on the Gulf Coast. He is up against the national security apparatus of the U.S., presented here as immense, murderous, ruthless, but has an extraordinary ally.
Bailey has created a character for the ages: Eli’s wife’s childhood friend, Nester Sanchez, who now runs New Mexico. A kind of Robin Hood, Nester is a hugely wealthy outlaw with an army. He dominates the gangs, the Catholic church, the Indian pueblos, even the drug cartels. BUT crime is down and public safety, housing development, graduation rates are all up.
Finally it is Nester against the U.S. Army in a startling showdown. If you take this book to the beach for your vacation week, take two. You’ll have this one finished by Wednesday.
