The group eventually witnesses a murder and decide to go after the party themselves rather than risk not being believed. Joining with Veteran Secret Service Agent Alex Ford, the group gets caught up in a complicated game of intrigue and conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. The books go deeper into the real identity of Oliver Stone and his history as a legendary assassin. In the follow up book The Collectors, the Camel Club once again must go to work when the Speaker of the House is assassinated. For her entire life, FBI agent Atlee Pine has been searching for her twin sister, Mercy, who was abducted at the age of six and never seen again. Mercy’s disappearance left behind a damaged family that later shattered beyond repair when Atlee’s parents inexplicably abandoned her.

The coffin finally reached the surface and was shifted away from the hole and set on the grass. Its metal carcass was visibly damaged by water, and also by sitting in the earth all those years. She wondered how preserved the contents would be. Memmott, Carol (February 27, 2013). "David Baldacci clues kids in to Smithsonian's treasures". USA Today. McLean, VA: Gannett. ISSN 0734-7456 . Retrieved 17 May 2013. I am your and Mercy’s father. That gives me certain responsibilities, none of which I have lived up to.” I regret a lot of things, Carol,” said Pine. But she put the car in gear and headed on to see the man who had lied to her more than any other person in her life.Her normal beat was in Arizona, near the Grand Canyon. It was a lot of ground to cover, and she was the only FBI agent out there. Pine preferred it that way. She hated bureaucracies and the paper pushers who lived and died by their stifling mountain of rules that got you nowhere fast. Certainly not with putting bad people away, which was really the whole point for her. Baldacci was a consulting producer on King & Maxwell, a TNT television series based on his characters Sean King and Michelle Maxwell. Jon Tenney and Rebecca Romijn starred. Now, after a perilous investigation that nearly proved fatal, Atlee has finally discovered not only the reason behind her parents’ abandonment and Mercy’s kidnapping, but also the most promising breakthrough yet: proof that Mercy survived her abduction and then escaped her captors many years ago. The Bureau had recently put out a PSA using an image of Mercy captured at the exact moment she had broken free from her improvised prison cell. Pine had hoped that if Mercy was alive she would see the notice and come forward. That had not happened, so Pine had decided to work on a different lead. Though Atlee is tantalizingly close to her family at last, the final leg of her long road to Mercy will be the most treacherous yet. Mercy left at least one dead body behind before fleeing her captors years before. Atlee has no idea if her sister is still alive, and if so, how she has been surviving all this time. When the truth is finally revealed, Atlee Pine will face the greatest danger yet, and it may well cost her everything.

Day of Doom ( Scholastic Publishing, 2013), Book 6 in the " Cahills vs. Vespers" series of The 39 Clues books PINE LOOKED AT CAROL BLUM. In her sixties, a mother of six grown children, and a longtime employee of the Bureau, Blum had become something of a surrogate mother to the federal agent, to some degree taking the place of the one who had abandoned her.Her last sighting was near Crawfordville, Georgia. She got away that night, or at least it appeared she did.” Now, Atlee is a young woman who pushes herself to be the best agent she can be, solving crimes she is sent to investigate. However, it is hard for Atlee to move one day without thinking of her sister, Mercy, and the pain of being separated for thirty years, not knowing what ever happened to her twin. In this concluding story, readers get to see if Mercy is alive or not and where has she been. Lest one thinks that is all to the story, there is much more along with other investigations Atlee and her assistant Carol Blum must solve if they can.

She now believed the man in the grave was none other than Ito Vincenzo. He had apparently discovered Tim Pine’s whereabouts and come to exact revenge on him. Only he had ended up being the one to die.He interrupted. “I knew more than I let on. And what I didn’t know I could have found out. The bottom line is, I have behaved abominably throughout this entire thing. I doubt any man could have been a worse father.”

The series is about two Secret Service agents who have fallen from grace after the political candidate King is guarding gets assassinated and the person Maxine Maxwell is guarding gets kidnapped. Split Second is the first book in the series published in 2003. In it, Maxwell is drawn to King’s case which is a good thing since a string of murders have him under suspicion. The action and pressure heat up as they get deeper into a series of coincidence that may have more to do with the past than the present. Gresham, Tom (December 11, 2019). "David Baldacci once wrote stories in secret at VCU. Now he has millions of readers around the world". Virginia Commonwealth University. Blum said, “And it doesn’t seem like the Atkinses did anything to, well, to educate her or . . . ” Her voice trailed off and she looked uncertainly at her boss.She didn’t like people looking for her. She didn’t want to be found. Only bad things could happen from that…‘And haven’t enough bad things already happened to me?’ In addition to Absolute Power being made into a movie, Wish You Well. The film stars Ellen Burstyn and Josh Lucas, finished shooting in 2012. David Baldacci has been featured on real-life crime show “Murder By The Book”. “Hardcover Mysteries” aired on the Investigation Discovery network in which he hosted an episode revolving around the death of Mary Meyer, who was alleged to have been having an affair with President Kennedy. Then Pine’s eyes narrowed and her look became less certain. “But it does seem unlikely that they would just take Desiree’s word for it that he was dead. They might have thought they could still save him, or that she was even lying about it. But if he was dead, they would have been terrified that animals could have torn Joe’s remains apart overnight. And we know that didn’t happen.” Baldacci and his wife, Michelle, are the co-founders of the Wish You Well Foundation, [5] which works to combat illiteracy in the United States by funding adult illiteracy and education programs. [6] Baldacci became involved with the National Multiple Sclerosis Society after his sister, author Sharon Baldacci, was diagnosed with MS. [7] The Atlee Pine novels are the most suspense-filled stories I have enjoyed in quite a spell. The series includes the following: A Long Road to Mercy, A Minute to Midnight and Daylight before concluding with Mercy. We first meet FBI Special Agent Atlee Pine as she is assigned her duties, encompassing the Grand Canyon, investigating a missing person’s case in the A Long Road to Mercy. Atlee’s early life consisted of her receiving serious head trauma as her twin sister was kidnapped right from their bedroom in the middle of the night. The pain of that memory is further exacerbated by the rhyme the intruder used to decide which girl to kidnap, a well-known child’s rhyme, “eenie, meenie, miney, mo”!