First Family

Former Secret Service agents turned private investigators Sean King and Michelle Maxwell are pulled into the orbit of the White House in David Baldacci's First Family (2009), the fourth novel in the King & Maxwell series. When the First Lady's young niece is abducted during a family gathering at Camp David, the First Lady turns not to the vast federal apparatus meant to protect her family, but to Sean King personally — a man to whom she owes a private debt from years before.

King and Maxwell take the case quietly, working the edges of a kidnapping that officialdom would rather keep contained, and find the trail leading through the First Family's own guarded history rather than away from it. It is a novel about the distance between a public family's image and its private truths, and about a case King cannot walk away from because of who is asking.