I'm not a kindle user, so am not involved in the controversy that makes up most of the reviews based upon it's Kindle price. This is simply a review of the book after reading it. And, I found it to be a decent thriller with one major flaw. Here's the upsides and downsides of it for me:

Upsides:
- I love the characters in this book: From "superheroes" Michelle, the blunt damaged secret service agent and Sean, her big more laid back partner to the evil-or-is-he-so-evil Quarry.
- Even though Michelle and Sean are from his previous book Simple Genius - this works just fine as a stand-alone thriller.

Downsides:
- The beginning was a little slow, though it picks up in the middle.
- The plot is mildly implausible, but that's alright given it's thriller nature. But, the ending just gets outrageously implausible. There's about 70 pages of it towards the end that go from one completely unbelievable action to another. I would just get through one thing that happened that I'd had to convince myself that "alright, maybe it's a little believable", before something even more outlandish would occur! The size of the "holes in the story"- just grew wider and wider!

BOTTOMLINE: A decent plot premise and characters brought down by some high-powered, completely unbelievable actions they take.

Baldacci does it again! Old characters with a new fresh plot. David continues his masterful ways of character development and an original roller coaster plot. First Family shows that he is still on the top of his game and among the best writers of action fiction. His fans can only hope that he continues to write.

Just for the record, the Kindle price for this book was $9.99 at the time I wrote this review.

If you liked Simple Genius, you'll find that First Family has many of the same appeals as well as a return of Sean King and Michelle Maxwell. This time Michelle closes in on the source of her childhood trauma . . . despite being ambivalent about finding out. The pair is overloaded with mysteries as the President's niece is kidnapped, the President's sister-in-law is murdered, and Michelle's mother is also killed. From the beginning, you'll follow the kidnappers but their motivation will be a mystery as well until near the end of the book. The book's key theme is the inevitability of justice being done . . . in one way or another.

The story starts pretty slowly but picks up speed around the middle. A good editor could have carved this book down by 150 pages, and it would have been a four-star novel. The remaining weakness is that Mr. Baldacci likes to exaggerate his characters just a little bit too much. As a result, they don't ring true in most cases. That makes it hard to live within the story as opposed to read about the characters. I thought that the mystery of Michelle's mother's death was pretty well done while the rest of the story was unnecessarily ponderous and sluggish. The best character in the book is the intelligent, resourceful, and poised kidnapped niece, Willa Dutton. The villain, Sam Quarry, is pretty entertaining as well for his contradictions. A book populated with more such characters that moved at a faster pace would have been a lot more fun.

Keep digging until you get to the bottom of every mystery!

The niece of the First Lady is kidnapped, and the little girl's mother is killed during the crime. At the request of the First Lady, PIs Sean King and Michelle Maxwell take on the case due to King's prior involvement with the First Family and his and Maxwell's ability to work outside the system. As they dig ever deeper into the case, things aren't what they at first seemed, and the investigation starts uncovering overtones of malfeasance in high places.

Baldacci returns to his roots, and the themes he explored so successfully in novels such as "Absolute Power". King and Maxwell are compelling, multi-faceted and captivating characters, much more so - in my opinion - than the overly cutesy Camel Club.

Further, the "bad guy" in this piece is also a fully realized human being; chillingly but understandably portrayed.

The actual key plot point is actually pretty easy to figure out from about halfway through the book; one of the reasons I didn't give it the fifth star. Further, I simply don't think Baldacci has yet managed to recapture the full depth and scope of his earliest works that brought him to prominence.

But for a light and escapist book to take to the beach or pool, this would be a good choice.

I agree with the Kindle owners on the overprice issue. Therefore, I borrowed my neighbor's hard-copy instead. I found the book slow in the beginning and trite. I'm not sure why the Investigator's mother's murder was inserted in the plot. It was as if a "filler" was needed to build up the page count. It didn't really advance the plot of the rest of the book; it was really a distraction. So, all in all, I finished it and did want to know how it would all turn out, even though it was quite convoluted. Not a bad book, but coming from Baldacci, I expected more.