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Summary
Summary
Known by his alias, "Oliver Stone," John Carr is the most wanted man in America. With two pulls of the trigger, the men who destroyed Stone's life and kept him in the shadows were finally silenced. But his freedom comes at a steep price: The assassinations he carried out prompt the highest levels of the U. S. government to unleash a massive manhunt. Yet behind the scenes, master spy Macklin Hayes is playing a very personal game of cat and mouse. He, more than anyone else, wants Stone dead. With their friend and unofficial leader in hiding, the members of the Camel Club risk everything to save him. Now, as the hunters close in, Stone's flight from the demons of his past will take him from the power corridors of Washington, D.C., to the small, isolated coal-mining town of Divine, Virginia--and into a world every bit as bloody and lethal as the one he left behind.
Author Notes
David Baldacci was born in Richmond, Virginia on August 5, 1960. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia. He practiced law in Washington D.C. as a trial and corporate lawyer.
His first novel, Absolute Power, was published in 1996. It won Britain's prestigious W.H. Smith's Thumping Good Read award for fiction in 1997 and was adapted as a movie starring Clint Eastwood. His other works include Total Control, The Winner, The Simple Truth, Saving Faith, True Blue, One Summer and End Game. He writes numerous series including King and Maxwell, Freddy and the French Fries, the Camel Club, Will Robie, Shaw and Katie James, John Puller, Vega Jane, and Amos Decker. He also published a novella entitled Office Hours and has authored five original screenplays.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Near the start of bestseller Baldacci's less than compelling fourth Camel Club thriller (after Stone Cold), former CIA assassin Oliver Stone (aka John Carr) boards a New Orleans-bound train at Washington's Union Station after shooting to death "a well-known U.S. senator and the nation's intelligence chief," the two men responsible for his wife's murder. Ever the Good Samaritan, Stone intervenes in a fight on the train, but when the Amtrak conductor asks to see his ID, he gets off at the next station, knowing his fake ID won't withstand scrutiny. So much for Stone's vaunted ability as a resourceful planner. This sudden detour takes Stone to Divine, Va., a mining town where he becomes enmeshed in corruption and intrigue--and falls, in just one of several clichEd situations, for an attractive if beleaguered widow. Series fans should be satisfied, but this effort lacks the imagination that distinguished Baldacci's debut, Absolute Power (1996). (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Readers who have been holding their breath since the end of Stone Cold (2007), the previous Camel Club novel, can inhale: Oliver Stone did survive his plunge into the water. For the uninitiated, Baldacci's Oliver Stone isn't the noted film director; he's a former government assassin who has made a risky living foiling government conspiracies. Now, having eluded capture after committing a pair of necessary assassinations, Stone (or John Carr, if you prefer to use his real name) is on the run, hiding out in rural America, where he discovers that small-town intrigue is at least as intricate and dangerous as anything he's come up against previously. Combining the Camel Club series' wit and fast pace with a Fugitive-like story (casting Stone as Richard Kimble, the man on the run who risks his life to protect the lives of strangers), Baldacci shows once again that he is a sort of thriller Renaissance man: a master of plot, dialogue, and character. It's fascinating to observe how Stone operates when he's entirely on his own, too. Not only is he evading his pursuers, especially Macklin Hayes, whose obsessive determination to capture Stone may be based more on personal reasons than professional ones, but he's also cast himself adrift from his comrades, who are working feverishly behind the scenes to find him and keep him safe. A rousing success, although this should come as no surprise to faithful Baldacci readers.--Pitt, David Copyright 2008 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Baldacci (The Whole Truth, 2008, etc.) moves his recurring Camel Club characters far enough offstage to let tough guy hero Oliver Stone take on a mean mountain town singlehandedly (for a while, at least) in something of the fashion of Lee Child's Jack Reacher. The dark American hole in need of a flushing out is Divine, a tiny burg in Virginia's far southwest coal country where quietly modest Vietnam hero Stone, n John Carr, has landed. It's not where he was going. He had been getting the hell out of Washington, D.C., where heavy-handed, stonehearted, government forces were about to close in on him, but he couldn't help stepping into an unfair fight brewing in his Amtrak coach. Handsome, youngish ex-high school quarterback Danny Riker was stupid enough to accuse knuckle draggers with whom he had been playing cards of cheating, leading to a knock down drag out in which Stone wasted all of the thugs and incurred the wrath of the Amtrak conductor, making it necessary for all involved to get off at the next stop. Stone takes Danny under his wing and Danny reluctantly takes Stone back home to Divine and his pretty motherAbby, owner of Divine's best diner. Stone notes quickly that Divine has a gloss of prosperity very unlike the neighboring hellholes. That sheen doesn't extend to the downtrodden miners whose hideous labors keep them gobbling methadone day after day. Where's the money coming from? There is one other visible industry, a supermax prison run by the brother of the handsome, straight-shooting sheriff, but that doesn't explain the prosperity. Stone begins to nose around the place, running up against numerous unsavory characters, saving lives when possible, getting mad when not, dodging the usual falling safes until his probing causes him to wake up buried alive in a dead coal mine. There is a dalliance withAbby, but the evil feds close in on Stone so it is necessary for his Camel Club cohorts to dig him out in the end. Tighter than the writer's most recent efforts, but far from spellbinding. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Having offed two guys who knew too much about his past, Oliver Stone is hiding--and his Camel Club is bereft. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
