The 2007 spy thriller Stone Cold is the third in David Baldacci’s Camel Club series. Picking up from where the previous novel left off, Stone Cold follows an ex-CIA hitman and his ragtag group of antiheroic do-gooders as they attempt to both flee from a ruthless casino mobster and unravel a Cold War era mystery that could impact the next presidential election. The Camel Club is a loosely organized group of intellectual oddballs headquartered in Washington, DC. Comprised of rare books expert and librarian Caleb Shaw, retired Special Forces soldier Ruben Rhodes, and math genius Milton Farb, they are led by a man who calls himself Oliver Stone. In the past, Stone was a member of the fictional "Triple Six" assassin division of the CIA, but he has since renounced killing and instead works to uncover the immoral secrets of the US government. When the novel opens, the brilliant young con artist Annabelle Conroy comes to the Camel Club for help. In The Collectors, the second novel of the series, Annabelle stole forty million dollars from casino king Jerry Bagger, the man who murdered her mother. Now Bagger has pieced her scam together and is out for bloody-minded revenge. With help from secret service agent Alex Ford, the Camel Club finds a way to both protect Annabelle and put down the threat of Bagger once and for all. In the process, Annabelle and Alex hit it off. But as this dangerous but manageable problem is dealt with, Stone is faced with a much bigger concern: someone has started to kill his former Triple Six team members one by one. After the most recent death, Stone is summoned by Carter Gray, the wily former head of the CIA who was also in charge of the Triple Six during Stone’s time with them. He tells Stone that the man responsible is Harry Finn, a contractor for Homeland Security with enough skills and know-how to get the better of CIA-trained assassins. Gray worries that he is next on Finn’s list. As Stone leaves Gray’s house, the building explodes, seemingly killing Gray. Harry Finn is leading a double life. By day he is a mild-mannered suburban dad who dotes on his wife Mandy and his three kids. But by night he is on a quest of vengeance, taking out the squad of CIA killers who murdered his father and made it look like a suicide when he was still a kid. He’s been driven to this desperate quest for vengeance by his elderly mother Lesya, who appears to be suffering from dementia, but is actually in hiding in her nursing home as we learn when we witness her speaking perfectly coherent Russian to her son. Lesya is a former Soviet sleeper agent who was embedded in the US but then fell in love with Finn’s father. They married and she became a double agent, but his spymaster, Gray, never quite believed that she was trustworthy. To punish him for the relationship, Gray sent the Triple Six team to kill him and make it look like a suicide. Finn has grown up hearing stories about this injustice all his life, and finally found himself in a position to do something about it. As Stone pieces together what happened to Finn’s father, he realizes that this was the last man that he ever killed – it was this terrible assassination that made him hang up his CIA credentials for good. To redeem himself in his own eyes, Stone finds a way to make peace with Finn. Instead of fighting each other, the men team up in order to uncover exactly who was behind the many assassinations Triple Six carried out. It turns out that at least some of them can be traced through Gray to Roger Simpson, a Southern senator and former CIA case director with his eye on the presidency. However vicious Gray was, it’s clear that Simpson is even more amoral and self-serving. But both have their hands very dirty: ever since the Vietnam War, they’ve been using the skills of the Triple Six team to kill anyone whose death was politically expedient for their own careers. The closer Stone, the Camel Club, and Finn are to uncovering the truth, the more danger they encounter. It turns out that Gray wasn’t actually killed in the explosion at his house. Instead, he faked his own death in order to prevent Stone from using his knowledge of Gray’s misdeeds against him. Gray has been a step behind Stone the entire time because he has had Stone shadowed. In the end, Stone saves not only the life of Finn, but those of Finn’s whole family. Unfortunately, in the process, Camel Club favorite Milton is killed. Unhinged by his friend’s death, Stone sheds his cover identity almost entirely, reverting to the ruthlessly murderous assassin John Carr that he once was in order to gun down both Gray and Simpson.

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David Baldacci

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Stone Cold

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