With a series of ever more accomplished novels, David Baldacci has been building something of a reputation for himself as one of the most reliable practitioners of the modern crime/thriller novel. The emphasis is, of course, usually on Baldacci's métier, the legal arena, and it's clearly the field he is most comfortable in -- as in Simple Genius. His long-term protagonists, Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, have found that the aftermath of their last case has stayed with them in an unpleasant way, and Michelle is obliged to undergo therapy. Sean, his financial circumstances straightened, takes on a job. A scientist is dead in a nearby town -- the scene of the (possible) crime is a clandestine research institute peopled by a large cast of neurotic scientists. There are secrets galore to be unearthed here, and just across the river from the institute there is another clandestine institution, the CIA training ground, Camp Peary, where the dead man's body was originally discovered. Sean finds himself at bay, with several government security services on his tail, even as Michelle struggles to regain her mental equilibrium.

As in such page-turning thrillers as Hour Game and Split Second, David Baldacci knows how to keep the reader thoroughly engrossed, and never loses the capacity to surprise us with the revelations that his beleaguered hero and heroine become party to. This is one of the longest Baldacci books, weighing in at nearly 600 pages, and there are lengthy appendices after the novel proper has finished. These may not retrospectively add to the appeal of the book of the reader has just finished, but they show that Baldacci has -- as always -- done his homework. --Barry Forshaw

2008-08-16 (3.5*) Sadly simple but no genius...

This was my first Baldacci and I found it all surface shine with very little underneath. The premise sounded intriguing: a quasi-secret code-breaking establishment working on inventing the quantum computer, set in the midst of both a US Naval establishment and a CIA facility. And with all the gumf about code-breaking etc (which Baldacci inserts well) I was looking forward to a bit of intellectual puzzlement. Sadly this is all pretty much irrelevant to the actual story, which doesn't really involve code-breaking or ciphers at all, and could equally well have been set anywhere that happened to be next door to the CIA.

The two protagonists are pleasant enough company, and the writing has an ease and flow that keeps the pages turning in a leisurely but never edge-of-your-seat kind of way. As another reviewer has mentioned there are really two stories going on here and while they sort of integrate, they don't add anything to each other.

With a whole load of stuff thrown in: the said quantum-computers, WW2 Enigma machines, buried colonial treasure, murder, drug-smuggling, secret airplanes, the possibility of terrorist torture chambers, the FBI, the CIA, the DEA... there's more than enough to keep us occupied, but at heart this is a very simple story. I had to giggle at the end when the police are called in to `arrest' the CIA!

So overall this is a competent and fun read: not obtrusive and desperate over-writing, characters whose company you can enjoy, a bit of gentle mystery etc, but it's no more than that. As other reviewers have said, Baldacci rather over-eggs the whole thing with his characters' names (Turing, Ventris, Chadwick, Champ Pollion: the `inventor' of the computer; the decipherers of linear B, the decipherer of the hieroglyphs) and there are likely to be others that I just wasn't aware off. This seems a little childish and unnecessary since code-breaking isn't really necessary to the story... and he caps it with Valerie Messaline, a nod to Valeria Messalina more commonly known as Messalina the wife of the emperor Claudius immortalised by Tacitus and Robert Graves' I, Claudius...

So an entertaining 3.5* read but completely throw-away, and it didn't leave me keen to read any more Baldacci.