by Hai Shunxi

Created on: June 10, 2010

Twelve-year-old Willa Dutton has gone missing; snatched from a suburban Virginia home by men who left her mother lifeless on the kitchen floor. What sets this apart from an ordinary Amber Alert is that Willa's aunt Jane just happens to live in a big White House in Washington, DC. If the First Lady's favorite niece has been snatched, it's gotta be Eye-rainian terrorists, right? Wrong. Sam Quarry's home-grown, and he's not a terrorist; or at least he doesn't think he is. Instead, he's the man with the plan - and the plan is pure and simple revenge.

As luck would have it, the kidnapping was nearly foiled by ex-Secret Service agents turned PI Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, who'd been called to the Dutton home on unspecified business. Since the two are already in the loop and, more importantly, since King has a personal relationship with First Lady Jane Cox; they're automatically on the case. That makes neither the FBI nor the Secret Service happy, but, then, King and Maxwell have never been good at making people happy...

From a decaying antebellum mansion in Alabama, Quarry masterfully manipulates the First Lady and, through her, PoTUS himself. With virtually no clues and  no apparent motive for the kidnapping, the authorities are baffled; and so are our heroes. Will the pair unravel the mystery in time to put a stop to Quarry's plan, whatever that might be? Chances are, it's gonna be close...

King and Maxwell return for fourths in David Baldacci's latest thriller, First Family; their first appearance since successfully recognizing the tune to Shenandoah to solve the mystery in Baldacci's previous low-budget thriller, Simple Genius (the two first appeared together in 2003's Split Second and later in Hour Game).  In the intervening couple of years, Baldacci's apparently been obsessed with Camels and Oliver Stone... but I digress. The protagonists are, per convention, as smart as they are deadly and as deadly as they are attractive; a potent set of skills for private eyes. It's also as hackneyed as the day is long; but apparently no one wants to read thrillers about pot-bellied, balding men and frumpy, frigid women: those attributes are reserved for the civil servants, such as FBI agents. It might help if either of the two was likeable, but that would be like deciding to "friend" a cardboard box on facebook.

 Baldacci being Baldacci, about a third of First Family has nothing to do with the First Family: it's a secondary plot about the murder of Maxwell's

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>