The Collectors

August 7, 2006
In bestseller Baldacci's entertaining if overly long sequel to The Camel Club
(2005), renegade CIA agent Roger Seagraves has set himself up in the business of freelance assassination and selling our country's secrets to the highest bidder. The Camel Club, a group of four dysfunctional crime solvers headed by ex-CIA assassin Caleb Shaw, becomes involved with Seagraves through a killing at the Library of Congress, where one of the club members works. Meanwhile, an enigmatic young woman, Annabelle Conroy, is assembling a team to engineer a "long con," a $33 million scam targeting Jerry Bagger, the sleazy owner of an Atlantic City casino. This time around, Baldacci wisely tones down the wackiness of the club members, focusing instead on bringing Seagraves to justice while Annabelle works her ingenious scam. The splicing of the two plots is problematic, but Baldacci sacrifices a bit of believability to cobble together a new cast of characters destined to continue fighting the forces of evil in the next installment.

Starred review from December 15, 2006
Two diverse elements collide in Baldacci's best book in years. A young woman gathers a few men together for the ultimate con that will net millions. Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, the speaker of the House is assassinated, and a short time later the director of the rare book room at the Library of Congress is found dead under mysterious circumstances. One of the man's colleagues, a member of a secret society that first appeared in last year's The Camel Club, asks his partners to help solve the crime. Exciting twists, fascinating characters, and insight into the machinations of the Library of Congress and the art of collecting rare books are only the tip of the iceberg in this rapid-fire thriller. With the open ending, readers will anxiously await the next adventure. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/06.]Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L.

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2006
The four disillusioned, aging gentlemen featured in Baldacci's 2005 best-seller, " The Camel Club" , are back in this engaging offering. The ringleader of the eccentric Washington, D.C., group (comprising obsessive-compulsive computer-whiz Milton Farb, decorated Vietnam vet Rueben Rhodes, and slightly rumpled library-scholar Caleb Shaw) is an ex-CIA conspiracy theorist who goes by the pseudonym Oliver Stone. All are reunited when Shaw's boss, the Library of Congress' director of Rare Books and Special Collections, is found dead. (Might he have been killed for possession of a rare collection of Puritan psalms?) Meanwhile, a few hundred miles away, sexy scam artist Annabelle Conroy avenges her mother's death with a fiendishly clever con pulled on a nefarious Atlantic City casino magnate. Though his two plots converge in a rather contrived way, Baldacci delivers crisp, economical prose and a cast of spies, misfits, and assassins that would make even the most patriotic citizen question the American political system. The best of the characters include gorgeous, gutsy newcomer Annabelle and the wonderfully idiosyncratic Stone, who spends many a day camped out on the lawn across from the White House with a sign that says, "I want the truth." (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)