Watch King & Maxwell, TNT's new series based on David Baldacci's blockbuster novels, on Mondays at 10 p.m. (ET/PT)
After the #1 New York Times bestsellers Split Second, Hour Game, Simple Genius, and First Family, Sean King and Michelle Maxwell return in their most shocking case: a high stakes struggle where the relentless needs of national security run up against the absolute limits of the human mind.
THE SIXTH MAN
Edgar Royan alleged serial killer held in a secure, fortress-like Federal Supermax facility-is awaiting trial. He faces almost certain conviction. Sean King and Michelle Maxwell are called in by Roy's attorney, Sean's old friend and mentor Ted Bergin, to help work the case. But their investigation is derailed before it beginsen route to their first meeting with Bergin, Sean and Michelle find him murdered.
It is now up to them to ask the questions no one seems to want answered: Is Roy a killer? Who murdered Bergin? With help from some surprising allies, they continue to pursue the case. But the more they dig into Roy's past, the more they encounter obstacles, half-truths, dead-ends, false friends, and escalating threats from every direction. Their persistence puts them on a collision course with the highest levels of the government and the darkest corners of power. In a terrifying confrontation that will push Sean and Michelle to their limits, the duo may be permanently parted.
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Associated Press on The Sixth Man
"A complex puzzle . . . Baldacci is a master craftsman."
Sean King and Michelle Maxwell are the fictitious protagonists who suspended our disbelief in First Family, Simple Genius, and other David Baldacci novels. Now these former Secret Service agents are tracking down the hidden story behind an accused serial killer. When they first agreed to meet with the defendant's lawyer, they had no way of knowing that they were signing up for an investigation that would confront a threat to national security. Another surefire triumphant by the author of the Barnes & Noble Bestseller Deliver Us From Evil.
Publishers Weekly
At the outset of Baldacci's routine fifth thriller featuring ex–Secret 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 villain—a venal politician—and a familiar Washington conspiracy plot. (Apr.)
Associated Press Staff
"A complex puzzle . . . Baldacci is a master craftsman."
Richmond Times-Dispatch
"Equal parts Hitchcock and James Bond, it's the perfect literary cocktail...One of Baldacci's best."
Newsweek
"It's his eager, expansive imagination that drives his books . . . Like other thriller writers, Baldacci depends on a mixture of inventive plotting, appealing characters, luck, and consistency. Unlike others, his books rely more on characters' relationships than whiz-bang technology or procedural twists . . . What he offers is in some ways more unusual."
Booklist (starred review)
"A rousing success . . . Baldacci shows once again that he is a sort of thriller Renaissance man: a master of plot, dialogue, and character."
Washington Post
"High-stakes action, shadowy government agencies, and [a] neo-Cold War backdrop . . . Baldacci pushes his plot ahead at such a blistering pace."
Richmond Times-Dispatch on Deliver Us from Evil
"Equal parts Hitchcock and James Bond, it's the perfect literary cocktail...One of Baldacci's best."
Newsweek on First Family
"It's his eager, expansive imagination that drives his books . . . Like other thriller writers, Baldacci depends on a mixture of inventive plotting, appealing characters, luck, and consistency. Unlike others, his books rely more on characters' relationships than whiz-bang technology or procedural twists . . . What he offers is in some ways more unusual."
Booklist (starred review) for Divine Justice
"A rousing success . . . Baldacci shows once again that he is a sort of thriller Renaissance man: a master of plot, dialogue, and character."
Washington Post on The Whole Truth
"High-stakes action, shadowy government agencies, and [a] neo-Cold War backdrop . . . Baldacci pushes his plot ahead at such a blistering pace."
From the Publisher
"Equal parts Hitchcock and James Bond, it's the perfect literary cocktail...One of Baldacci's best."—Richmond Times-Dispatch on Deliver Us from Evil"It's his eager, expansive imagination that drives his books . . . Like other thriller writers, Baldacci depends on a mixture of inventive plotting, appealing characters, luck, and consistency. Unlike others, his books rely more on characters' relationships than whiz-bang technology or procedural twists . . . What he offers is in some ways more unusual."—Newsweek on First Family
"A rousing success . . . Baldacci shows once again that he is a sort of thriller Renaissance man: a master of plot, dialogue, and character."—Booklist (starred review) for Divine Justice
"High-stakes action, shadowy government agencies, and [a] neo-Cold War backdrop . . . Baldacci pushes his plot ahead at such a blistering pace."—Washington Post on The Whole Truth
"Gripping, chilling, and full of surprises."—Publishers Weekly on Stone Cold
Kirkus Reviews
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.
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