Simple Genius

Simple Genius is a thriller by the American writer David Baldacci, published on 24 April 2007 by Grand Central Publishing. It continues the story of Michelle Maxwell and Sean King from Split Second and Hour Game.

King is financially hard-pressed and is trying to help his professional partner Maxwell, who is in hospital after a night of suicidal violence. He takes a case from his ex-girlfriend Joan Dillinger, a fellow former Secret Service agent who now runs her own private investigation agency, and the work is based at a laboratory near Williamsburg, Virginia, where a scientist has been found dead just inside the CIA's security fence. The setting places two clandestine institutions across a heavily guarded river from each other: a research laboratory whose goals and funding are unexplained, and an elite CIA training camp. As King works, he uncovers layer after layer of disinformation covering a world of mathematicians, physicists, war heroes and field agents, along with a girl whose mathematical ability is extraordinary and a breakthrough in classified codes. The case turns out not to be a simple murder, and King ends up needing Maxwell at her best to help him stop a conspiracy of traitors operating in the shadow of the White House.

Baldacci writes the King and Maxwell books as conspiracies that grow out of a single investigation, and the partnership between the two of them, one working while the other recovers, is the thread that runs through the series.