Product Description

The man known as Oliver Stone has no official past. He spends most days camped opposite the White House, hoping to expose corruption wherever he finds it. 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. Especially when the authorities are seemingly happy to write it off as a suicide. For Secret Service agent Alex Ford, monitoring the 'investigation', the suicide verdict doesn't ring true. As punishment for sticking his nose where it doesn't belong, he is reassigned to bodyguard duties. 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. 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 ...And 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 .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22014 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Few crime novelists have been as successful as David Baldacci, and The Camel Club joins an illustrious collection. In such books as Absolute Power and Saving Faith, he forged a reputation as an adroit and imaginative writer, while with Wish You Well, he enriched his already accomplished characterisation. Baldacci is particularly good at the dynamics of conflict within a family as much as external threat, and without ever trying to manipulate the reader’s emotions, he had us involved in a dramatic and affecting narrative that dealt with issues of personal choice quite as cogently as with the large-scale emotions of the plot.

Subsequently, Hour Game was an innovative spin on a familiar theme, featuring Baldacci's series characters: the tall, athletic Michelle Maxwell and the brilliant aesthete Sean King, both ex-Secret Service personnel who were obliged to leave their jobs under a cloud. The duo encountered some pretty nasty things in Hour Game, which added new levels of gruesomeness, with the decomposed body of a young woman found arranged in a bizarre position, while two teenagers are bloodily slaughtered having sex in a car.

The Camel Club, however, is both similar to and different from Baldacci’s other books. We meet an enigmatic figure, Oliver Stone (one wonders why Baldacci chose the name of a well-known film director for this character), a man with no past. His occupation appears to be permanent protestor outside the White House, member of a cabal of believers in all available conspiracy theories, who are, collectively, The Camel Club. But (as in the author's signature book, Absolute Power) the group stumbles across a murder that they're not supposed to see--a murder rigged to appear as suicide. And, as in the earlier book, Stone and his friends find themselves involved in a very dangerous plot, reaching to the upper echelons of Washington society.

While Baldacci may be ploughing a field he’s worked before, he remains a master of the complex, character-driven thriller.

--Barry Forshaw

Dorset Echo
'another gripping thriller'

Peterborough Evening Telegraph
'One of my favourite thrillers of the year'

Customer Reviews

The Camel Club
David Baldacci has once again produced a magnificent clever thriller. He has combined a smart well-paced plot full of interesting, believeable characters and a page-turning style that is probably unmatched by any other legal thriller writer.
The plot is relentless from the off. It combines foreign terrorists with American conspirators and their target is the President of the USA.
Well recommended for people who enjoy an edge of your seat thriller that has brains as well as action.

Feed this book to Camels
I came about this book in a rather strange way. I literally found it on the concrete by a city park bench. Bargain, free book! (or so i thought)

It is the first David Baldacci book I have read and I'm afraid its also going to be the last. Now i understand why the previous owner left it on a city pavement, it can't have been by mistake.

The characters are unbelievable, the story flows like cement and the plot is just plain ridiculous. People say the best things in life are free. Obviously they have never found this book.

excellent, but a bit long
excellent book. well researched. i couldnt find fault with anything he says about islam. well balanced.
but i found the end deeply disturbing. it was as if he had reached his target number ofwords and just stopped. deeply unsatisfying end.