The Sixth Man

March 14, 2011
At the outset of Baldacci's routine fifth thriller featuring exâSecret Service agents Sean King and Michelle Maxwell (after First Family), the pair, who now work together as private investigators, fly to Maine to meet Ted Bergin, King's old law professor. Bergin has hired King and Maxwell to assist in his defense of Edgar Roy, a U.S. government employee who's been indicted for murdering six people found buried on Roy's Virginia farm. Because for some reason it's a federal case, Roy is incarcerated at a Maine prison. Near their destination, the PIs stop to investigate a broken-down car on the side of the road. Inside is Bergin, who's been shot between the eyes. King and Maxwell probe deeper into the charges against Roy to find the professor's killer, with no help from Roy, who hasn't been talking since his arrest. A fast pace compensates only in part for a cartoonish villainâa venal politicianâand a familiar Washington conspiracy plot.

April 15, 2011

To keep al-Qaeda zealots, megalomaniac North Koreans with nukes and other bad guys at bay, gigabytes of real-time intelligence stream to the Wall, there to be collated and conceptualized by one man, the Analyst.

The Analyst, once an anonymous IRS bureaucrat with an eidetic memory and a strangely powerful intellect, now sits mute in a federal supermax prison, an accused serial killer. Baldacci (First Family, 2009, etc.) drops Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, Secret Service agents turned private investigators, into the mess. King has agreed to investigate the murders at the behest of defense attorney Ted Bergin, his beloved mentor. On their way to meet Bergin at the prison in Maine, King and Maxwell happen upon Bergin sitting in his vehicle on an isolated road, emergency lights flashing, murdered. Baldacci's realistic plot blends patriotism and naked ambition, greed and paranoia and bureaucratic infighting. With the Wall providing a singular source of accurate information, the government's alphabet departments are losing funding, especially Homeland Security, the fiefdom of manipulatively ambitious Ellen Foster. Peter Bunting, chief of a private-security company, is the genius behind the Wall and the Analyst. Mason Quantrell, owner of a rival company, is more interested in fat contracts than useful intelligence. Then there are the Analyst's sister, Kelly Paul, a woman with her own secrets; James Harkes, an agent without a badge but with a propensity for unleashing violence; and finally, Edgar Roy, the Analyst, brilliant, shy, lonely and deeply troubled about his part in the death and destruction generated by the Wall. This novel is action-adventure, the plot ricocheting between isolated Maine woods and Washington power corridors, with stops in Virginia and New York. It's Baldacci's fifth book in a series featuring King and Maxwell, and one that further explores their complex and sometimes thorny relationship.

Authentic scenario, mystery piled on misdirection and more double-crosses than a tic-tac-toe tournament.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 1, 2010

Not much information here--all I can say is that it's another King and Maxwell book--but it's coming, and it will be big. Buy multiples.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2011
This should have been another rip-roaring Baldacci thriller. Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, the former Secret Service agents who have starred in four previous novels, are off to Maine, where Tom Bergin, Seans former mentor and the lawyer for an accused serial killer, has asked them to look into the case. En route, they encounter a parked car with its four-ways flashing. Inside is Bergins murdered body. Is his client, whos locked up in a supermax prison, somehow responsible? And, if so, why? This intriguing story is marred by uncharacteristically poor writing. Baldaccis characters tell each other things they should already know, for the benefit of the reader; dialogue is repeated, as though the author has forgotten hes already covered this ground (or he thinks were too dim to remember the information); the characters are thin; and the dialogue is stilted. Like a rookie, Baldacci seems to think theres something wrong with the word said, leaving his characters to retort, reply, counter, and grouse (sometimes all on the same page). Fans will likely flock to the book because of Baldaccis track record, but fair warning: they might feel short-changed by his sloppy storytelling. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Can track record alone sell a bad book? Yes, when its combined with a marketing budget of the kind that midlist authors dream about.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)