He writes as if he imagines his typical reader to be a business traveler staring down a long layover. Baldacci himself seems only partly engaged in the task here.

Scooby-Doo had villains more complicated than these distinctive quirks of the characters, such as one wearing 19th-century clothing, make them only mildly interesting. Baldacci is not a particularly graceful writer, e.g., “Like all Secret Service agents, his suits were designed a little big in the chest, to disguise the bulge of the weapon.” Worse is the author’s chronic inability to draw convincing characters. Throughout, Baldacci ( Hour Game, 2004, etc.) drops reliable twists, revealing the federal agent murder to be-surprise-a minuscule piece of a much bigger plot involving snipers, nukes, a presidential kidnapping and an even gloomier vision of the future. Thus the author’s bleak imagining of the near future. Rocket-propelled grenades have pierced the White House, there’s been another prison fiasco in Afghanistan, a dozen soldiers are dying every day and the war has opened a new front on the Syrian border. The Camel Club is followed by The Collectors, Stone Cold, Divine Justice and Hell's Corner.A lukewarm would-be potboiler of uninvolving intrigue about a kooky quartet of conspiracy theorists-one by the name of “Oliver Stone”-who witness the murder of a federal agent.Īlmost 8,000 Americans have died in attacks on U.S. Meanwhile, America's powerful intelligence chief Carter Gray is unnerved when he glimpses the face of an old acquaintance in Arlington Cemetery - but it is the face of a man supposedly long dead.Īnd as The Camel Club is poised to expose a conspiracy that reaches into the heart of Washington's highly secretive corridors of power, Alex Ford finds out that his worst nightmare is about to happen. His abilities are tested to the limit when he is sent to protect the President during a visit to his hometown, where a terrorist cell has spent months plotting an event that will shake the world. As punishment for sticking his nose where it doesn't belong, he is reassigned to bodyguard duties.

Especially when the authorities are seemingly happy to write it off as a suicide.įor Secret Service agent Alex Ford, monitoring the 'investigation', the suicide verdict doesn't ring true. But the stakes are raised when he and his friends, a group of conspiracy theorist misfits known as The Camel Club, accidentally witness the murder of an intelligence analyst. He spends most days camped opposite the White House, hoping to expose corruption wherever he finds it. The man known as Oliver Stone has no official past. The Camel Club by best-selling sensation David Baldacci is the exciting first instalment of a breathtaking series.

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