The Sixth Man

Edgar Roy, a gifted government intelligence analyst, has been locked away in a psychiatric unit and charged with mass murder — and his attorney, Sean King's old friend and mentor Ted Bergin, has asked Sean and Michelle Maxwell to help build his defense. Before the pair can properly start, Bergin turns up dead, and in David Baldacci's The Sixth Man (2011), the fifth novel in the King & Maxwell series, the question of Roy's guilt becomes inseparable from the question of who silenced the one man defending him.

King and Maxwell's digging into Roy's past sends them past a string of dead ends and half-truths toward the government's most closely guarded secrets, and toward people determined to make sure the truth stays buried — whatever it costs the two investigators personally.