Lucas Adcock
Staff Writer
David Baldacci is an American with an Italian descent, #1 bestselling novelist, best known for his thriller, suspense and legal-thriller novels. As it stands in April 2026, he has published more than 60 books within a strenuous career that be-gan in 1996. But Baldacci has different roots. Law roots. Shortly after graduating from the Virginia School of Law, he began his practice. That was also the beginning of his storytelling.
His job in law, essentially, was telling a more-convincing story than his counterpart. And as it turned out, he was very good at it. So, he decided to pursue a writing career. His first published novel, “Absolute Power” immediately sparked interest amongst publishers and even the film industry, where he later had a movie adaptation involving actor Clint Eastwood who played the role of the main character. This jumpstarted his writing career.
He recently returned to the Lewis Theater in Lewisburg for an “evening,” presented by New Chapter Bookstore.
No stranger to literary events, Baldacci said, “Twenty-five years ago, I got a fan letter from a woman named Barbara Bush. In that letter she said, ‘George and I are big fans, and we would love for you to come to Houston to talk at our Literacy Gala.’”
So, he started a friendship with the President of the United States, taking a rather thrilling boat ride with George Bush, and even meeting three more U.S. Presidents since that time. During his amazing career, he’s also had some very humorous events including speaking with an acquaintance who worked in stealth forensics – “a wealth of knowledge for a thriller writer.” While on the Amtrack train to New York, he’d spoken with the woman on the phone, asking specifics on how to murder someone and get away with it (for his story, of course).
She’d given him great advice, even admitting, “David, trust me, you do it the way you describe; I don’t know of any forensic protocols done postmortem that would unearth the fact that this person was murdered. It’s pretty much like the perfect crime.”
Now that he could write the perfect murder in his novel with confidence, he said to the woman, “If I ever need to kill anyone else, I’m going to call you.”
Once the call had ended, he looked up. The guy across from him had spilled his coffee from his neck to his crotch, one big brown stain and not a happy camper. Another guy across from him had a petrified expression on his face. And then the Amtrak police showed up. He didn’t make it to New York that day, and apparently the Amtrak police didn’t read crime fiction and thrillers.
As a writer myself, I was very interested in speaking with Mr. Baldacci. My main question for him is an issue that I think many writers are faced with today, including Baldacci himself – artificial intelligence. Many of the leading AI models illegally used thousands of novels to train their models without the authors’ consent. Mr. Baldacci was one of those authors, having been in a legal suit for three years now.
My question was, “Given the rise of AI and its controversial issue in the publishing industry right now, do you see the publishing market becoming more congested and more difficult to publish in, especially as a debut author?”
His response was extraordinary. I could tell I sparked a passionate interest in him when he took a deep breath, his demeanor becoming more serious.
“If you really think these tech guys are geniuses,” he began, “they looked all over the world to find out how to create superintelligence. They spent billions of dollars feeding dictionaries into it, feeding other stuff into these large language models. Nothing worked, nothing. Except one thing. They started feeding novels into the language models. And all of a sudden these systems got smart as hell.”
So many authors have been exposed to this issue, their own work stolen to feed the machine.
“I don’t want to sound dystopian,” Baldacci sighed. “But it is serious.”
He explained that years ago he asked ChatGPT to write one of his novels, “It was ok,” he admitted. “But it wasn’t really anything to be concerned over. But I recently did the same thing and it wrote one of my novels in thirty minutes – 90,000 words, and it was pretty darn good.”
Nevertheless, he closed with a defining statement after a question of collaboration.
“When I write books,” he said, “it’s just me, because I don’t want to write with anyone else. It’s not the reason I became a writer, sharing that responsibility.”
David Baldacci has sold more than 150 million copies of his books with copies in over 45 different languages. More than 39 of his novels have been New York Times bestsellers. He is published in over 80 countries. A respected author amongst the writing community, Baldacci is still releasing successful novels, his latest titled: Hope Rises, the second novel in the Walter Nash Series.
