Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5264 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-06
• Released on: 2007-06-25
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Gazette (Weekly journal of the Law Society)
'Brilliantly plotted, The Collectors lives up to the high
standards expected of David Baldacci...Cleverly written with intriguing
characters'

Synopsis
Annabelle is a beautiful stranger with a mysterious past, planning the heist of the century - two short cons to fund a long con, then a life of unashamed luxury, incognito in a foreign land. Jonathan DeHaven, the shy head of the Rare Books Division at the Library of Congress, is planning nothing more than an uneventful day amongst his cherished collection. But when Jonathan is found dead by Caleb Shaw, a member of the Camel Club, two conspiracies are destined to meet as the Club determines to track down the dead man's long-lost wife - and Annabelle decides to avenge the death of her beloved ex-husband. Unfortunately, the victim of Annabelle's long con has sworn eternal revenge and Jonathan's killers will stop at nothing to keep the truth about his death, and the code they have perfected over the years, from surfacing ...

Customer Reviews

Famous Five meets Scooby Doo
This has been the first David Baldacci book that I have tried and I suspect it will be the last.

The book has weak characters and an unconvincing plot.

To its credit, however, the book did have me in stitches when the criminal mastermind was finally unmasked.

Good but not perfect
The main quality of the book is that it starts with two lines that it joins later into one without completely closing any one of the two. The two lines are so different that the book becomes kind of funny when they join. On one hand a band of four gangsters that are making millions on the gullible back of a casino boss - who is of course crooked and criminal - in Atlantic City. They succeed though one mistake will cost his life to the younger gangsters who did make the mistake because of his unquenchable hormones. The second line is a spy ring in Washington DC that involves the Library of Congress - LOC for favored fans - and the rare books reading room as the medium for the the circulating of the stolen data and then later as the target itself because of the resistance of some of its personnel. I can't give away all the details of the successful destruction of the spy ring, a destruction that is only reached because the leader of the ring who is an inner circle CIA spy makes several mistakes that are absolutely unexplainable. He does not kill the one person he has abducted for interrogation though he has no use of him any more afterwards and this abducted person is revealed as in the know of too many elements and hence as dangerous. Then we could accumulate the smaller mistakes from beginning to end and the list would be long. Let's mention the last one only that will cost te spy ring boss his life when he decides to have a conversation with the same person as before instead of killing him straight away. How dumb one spy can be! Or is he in love with his counterpart? But the novel suffers because of it. It looks and sounds amateurish when we expect everything to be great art and powerful conjuring magic. The book though has a meaning. It shows marvellously well that no security system is good enough to prevent crime, spying, etc. There is always a possible con or plot, a possible way to make a con or a plot successful. It seems easier to kill someone than to pass water in the morning. The result is that the security of the USA is always endangered because there is a lot of money on the intelligence market and small secrets, or big war plans, will always interest those who have millions they don't know what to do with, especially millions of dollars that are depreciating so fast on the international market, though not on the US market. And in the end the best protection for the country comes from simple law-abiding citizens in alliance with patriotic ex-security people and expert criminals who are patriotic for reasons that have nothing to do with the nation itself, but rather with the USA as the money making territory that they are for them and may not be any more after a successful terrorist attack or war. The security of the US is in other words a simple business in contingency. To believe otherwise is plain either vanity or short-sightedness.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, University Paris Dauphine, Université Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines.

Dull as dishwater
It has taken me 4 months to finish this drab and boring book. I have gone on to read several others and sheer determination made me see it through to the end. The "main" characters are like a modern day last of the summer wine with the ability to do special things, kill, super memory as 2 examples. The twists are simply so obvious and uninspiring I was actually groaning as I turned the pages. Do yourself a favour and give this one a miss