Two disgraced Secret Service agents collide in David Baldacci's Split Second (2003), the first novel in the King & Maxwell series. Sean King's career ended eight years earlier when a split-second lapse let an assassin gun down the presidential candidate he was guarding; Michelle Maxwell's career implodes the same way when the candidate she is protecting vanishes without a trace. When a body turns up in the office of King, now a small-town lawyer, and Maxwell reaches out after seeing him on the news, the two are drawn together to investigate the disappearance and reopen the wound of King's own disgrace.
What follows is a fast-moving conspiracy thriller built on short chapters and quick scene shifts, as King and Maxwell uncover a web of political corruption and kidnapping tying their two separate failures to the same long-running scheme. Reviewers describe it as a tense, twist-heavy page-turner that reads quickly despite its length, launching the six-book King & Maxwell series that follows the pair through several more investigations.
