Amazon.de
Two disgraced former Secret Service officers team up to solve a series of copy-cat crimes in this exciting new thriller by a master of the game. Sean King was momentarily distracted when a presidential candidate he'd been guarding was assassinated a few feet from where he stood, and Michelle Maxwell left the Service under a similar cloud when she lost a "protectee" to an ingenious kidnapping scheme, events told in Baldacci's typical terse, fast-paced style in Split Second. Now partners in a private investigation firm in a small Virginia town, they're hired to investigate a burglary at the home of a wealthy local family. But even before the chief suspect in the break-in meets his death in a gruesome slaying reminiscent of a serial killer long since caught and punished, King and Maxwell get caught up in a string of other murders, each of which copies the techniques of another madman, from San Francisco's Zodiac Killer to Chicago's infamous John Wayne Gacy. While the two protagonists aren't especially complex or well-developed, the action never stops, and Baldacci's trademark pacing keeps the reader turning pages until the denouement, which unfortunately isn't quite as satisfying as the rest of the novel. --Jane Adams
Amazon.com Exclusive Content
Why Hour Game: An Exclusive Essay by David Baldacci
It's hard not to notice that the majority of fictional serial killers are cut from the same mold. When David Baldacci wrote Hour Game, he went out of his way to create a murderous original. Read this Amazon.com exclusive essay to learn how and why he did it.
Amazon.co.uk
In Hour Game David Baldacci finally gets around to writing a serial killer plot--and his approach to that hoary old cliché is as inventive and ingenious as one would expect. His is not the first serial killer to perform his various atrocities in quotation marks and in the style of killers dead and gone, but Baldacci's does so with considerable ingenuity and for well-plotted reasons that are not mere games-playing. He also does so in a small community which a small epidemic of sudden horrible death tears apart--Baldacci is a small 'c' conservative for whom the nightmare of crime is the way that it affronts community and family, and in this, as in other books, he makes a not unappealing case for his value system. As with the equally ingenious Split Second, his investigators here are ex-Secret Service protection squad Michelle and Sean, now working together as private eyes on a case at first peripheral to the killings--clearing the name of a handyman accus! ed of burglary. When their client and his alleged victim join the death list, it all gets very personal. Baldacci is always crisp and clever and this lives up to his usual standards.--Roz Kaveney
