*He's copying famous serial killers.
And the HOUR GAME has just begun...*

A woman is found murdered in the woods. It seems like a simple case but it soon escalates into a terrible nightmare. Someone is replicating the killing styles of the most infamous murderers of all time. No one knows this criminal's motives...or who will die next.

Two ex-Secret Service agents, Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, have been hired to defend a man's innocence in a burglary involving an aristocratic family. Then a series of secrets leads the partners right into the frantic hunt that is confounding even the FBI. Now King and Maxwell are playing the Hour Game, uncovering one horrifying revelation after another and putting their lives in danger. For the closer they get to the truth, the closer they get to the most shocking surprise of all.

Amazon.com Review

Two disgraced former Secret Service officers team up to solve a series of copy-cat crimes in this exciting new thriller by a master of the game. Sean King was momentarily distracted when a presidential candidate he'd been guarding was assassinated a few feet from where he stood, and Michelle Maxwell left the Service under a similar cloud when she lost a "protectee" to an ingenious kidnapping scheme, events told in Baldacci's typical terse, fast-paced style in Split Second. Now partners in a private investigation firm in a small Virginia town, they're hired to investigate a burglary at the home of a wealthy local family. But even before the chief suspect in the break-in meets his death in a gruesome slaying reminiscent of a serial killer long since caught and punished, King and Maxwell get caught up in a string of other murders, each of which copies the techniques of another madman, from San Francisco's Zodiac Killer to Chicago's infamous John Wayne Gacy. While the two protagonists aren't especially complex or well-developed, the action never stops, and Baldacci's trademark pacing keeps the reader turning pages until the denouement, which unfortunately isn't quite as satisfying as the rest of the novel. --Jane Adams

Amazon.com Exclusive Content

Why Hour Game: An Exclusive Essay by David Baldacci

It's hard not to notice that the majority of fictional serial killers are cut from the same mold. When David Baldacci wrote Hour Game, he went out of his way to create a murderous original. Read this Amazon.com exclusive essay to learn how and why he did it.

From Publishers Weekly

Stage and film actor Brick, an Audie Award–winning veteran of more than 150 audiobooks, is clearly a pro at interpreting the printed word. And Baldacci's exciting new thriller, in which Secret Service agents–turned–private detectives Sean King and Michelle Maxwell hunt a murderer copycatting infamous serial killers, gives him particularly powerful material to work with. To vocalize the sleuths' complementary but differing lifestyles, Brick adjusts his pace and pitch: faster and subtly higher for energetic "supernova" Maxwell, firmer and more authoritative for "steady glacier" King. For chapters dealing with the unidentified killer, he uses an unemotional, affectless narration that makes the graphic violence even more chilling. For other denizens of the book's rural Virginia location, the actor displays an assortment of Southern drawls, from the melodious, genteel tenor of a septuagenarian King-Maxwell client to the commanding Steel Magnolia tone of a powerful matriarch. Once the killer is unmasked, much of the novel's tension dissipates, and it never quite returns, even when the villain miraculously escapes to take care of unfinished business. Possibly sensing this problem, Brick revs up the narrative pace after the jailbreak, making sure listeners will be paying full attention for the final surprise. It's worth waiting for.
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