Split Second (King & Maxwell) - Hardcover

Baldacci, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446530891 ISBN 13: 9780446530897

Publisher: Grand Central Pub, 2003

Synopsis

Michelle Maxwell has just blown her future with the Secret Service. Against her instincts, she led a presidential candidate out of her sight to comfort a grieving widow. Then, behind closed doors, the politician whose safety was her responsibility vanished into thin air.
Living a new life on a quiet lake in central Virginia, Sean King knows how the younger agent feels. He's been there before. In an out-of-the-way hotel eight years earlier, the hard-charging Secret Service man allowed his attention to be diverted for a split second. And the presidential candidate Sean was protecting was gunned down before his eyes.
Now Michelle and Sean are about to see their destinies converge. She has become obsessed with Sean's case. And he needs a friend - especially since a series of macabre killings has brought him under suspicion and prompted the reappearance of a seductive woman he's tried hard to forget.
As the two discredited agents enter a maze of lies, secrets, and deadly coincidences, they uncover a violence that shattered their lives were really a long time in the making - and are a long way from over.

About this title

Review

Split Second is David Baldacci at the top of his well-informed game, with a real sense of what the Secret Servicemen who protect the President and presidential candidates think about the job and how it feels to fail. Sean King looked away at the wrong moment and a man died; his career ended and he has spent eight years rebuilding a life. When Michelle Maxwell makes a similar mistake, she becomes convinced that there is a link between the man she lost to kidnappers and the man Sean failed to protect--and the more she learns, the more she can prove.

This is an odd couple thriller--Sean and Michelle have radically different attitudes to the job they both did well--and ingeniously put together in terms of what it tells us about the shadowy villain manipulating events and what it delays telling us about the past. It is a well-informed thriller that wears its research lightly--it has a sense of how it feels to see every large room as a potential killing ground in which you have to protect very vulnerable public men, and some charming scenes of budding romantic comedy. --Roz Kaveney

Review

"Baldacci's brain-teasing plot leaves you wanting more...high scoring shoot-'em-up."

Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Pub
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0446530891
• ISBN 13: 9780446530897
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 406