FBI special agent Pine’s twin sister, Mercy, was taken from the room they shared as young children. “It’s seared into Atlee Pine’s memory; the kidnapper’s chilling rhyme as he choase between six-year-old Atlee and her twin sister, Mercy. Mercy was taken, Atlee was spared.” The story starts with Agent Pine going to visit the killer in the supermax prison ADX in Florence Colorado, but her home base is in the remote parts of the Southwest.
Atlee has never stopped searching for her sisters’ body and the survivor’s guilt has led her to spent her life hunting down those who hurt others. She has just been assigned to investigate a case in the Grand Canyon when a mule is found dead with strange carvings on its body, and its rider missing.
The search for the missing rider takes her across country and involves a plot that is a threat to the entire world by a monster she had never considered.
This is the first book in David Baldacci’s new Atlee Pine thriller series. A good start.
Quotes
“Justice. It wasn’t about the greater good. It was about what was right and wrong on an individual basis. Person by person. Because if you neglected the people, the idea of a greater good was a pipe dream created by those whose idea of the “greater good” almost always tended to favor themselves and people like them.”
“For me, the Canyon isn’t just a tourist destination. It’s a living, breathing place. It has a dozen plants that live nowhere else.
“She’d heard that the author Margaret Mitchell had never lived in a place with more than one bedroom for a simple reason: She had never wanted houseguests.”
“narcissist. People often discounted narcissism as relatively harmless because the term sometimes conjured the clichéd image of a vain man staring longingly at his reflection in a pool of water or a mirror. However, Pine knew that narcissism was probably one of the most dangerous traits someone could possess for one critical reason: The narcissist could not feel empathy toward others. Which meant that the lives of others held no value to a narcissist. Killing could even be like a hit of fentanyl: instant euphoria from the domination and destruction of another. That was why virtually every serial murderer was also a narcissist.”