The President's Shadow
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3.9 • 720 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A severed arm, found buried in the White House Rose Garden.
A lethal message with terrible consequences for the Presidency.And a hidden secret in one family's past that will have repercussions for the entire nation.
Following The Inner Circle and The Fifth Assassin, #1 bestselling author Brad Meltzer returns with . . .
The President's Shadow
There are stories no one knows. Hidden stories. I find those stories for a living.
To most, it looks like Beecher White has an ordinary job. A young staffer with the National Archives in Washington, D.C., he's responsible for safekeeping the government's most important documents . . . and, sometimes, its most closely held secrets.
But there are a powerful few who know his other role. Beecher is a member of the Culper Ring, a 200-year-old secret society founded by George Washington and charged with protecting the Presidency. Now the current occupant of the White House needs the Culper Ring's help. The alarming discovery of the buried arm has the President's team in a rightful panic. Who buried the arm? How did they get past White House security? And most important: What's the message hidden in the arm's closed fist? Indeed, the puzzle inside has a clear intended recipient, and it isn't the President. It's Beecher, himself.
Beecher's investigation will take him back to one of our country's greatest secrets and point him toward the long, carefully hidden truth about the most shocking history of all: family history.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If Clint Eastwood had a book club, you could expect to see Brad Meltzer’s third Beecher White installment, The President’s Shadow, on the reading list. Once again, Meltzer delivers a tense thriller anchored in political history. As a member of the Culper Ring, a secret agency tasked with protecting the President, our archivist protagonist is called in to help solve the mystery of a human arm discovered in the White House Rose Garden. What unravels is a high-speed plot that threatens the presidency and involves the Secret Service, a psychopathic killer, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Beecher’s father.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Meltzer's third near-future Culper Ring thriller (after 2013's The Fifth Assassin) opens with a great dramatic image: First Lady Shona Wallace finding a severed arm in the White House Rose Garden. This grim discovery leads President Orson Wallace to consult Beecher White, a member of the Ring, which was founded by George Washington to "protect the presidency" and at present consists of only six members. The two men have a complicated relationship: Beecher once saved Wallace's life, but also believes that the chief executive committed a violent crime as a college student. Beecher agrees to help Wallace when he learns that the dead man's hand was clutching a flattened penny that could have a link to the mysterious death, many years before, of Beecher's father, who was a mechanic in the Army. Fans of historical conspiracy fiction will find a lot to like, but readers should be prepared for thin characters and a wildly over-the-top plot. 10-city author tour.
Customer Reviews
Good read
Some plot points were predictable but still a good read.
Convoluted…and still not over
If you like Meltzer and the Culper Ring, you’ll enjoy the many facets of this part of the tale. Suspense, murders, bad guys, good guys, hard to know the difference at times. And this can’t be theclast in the series.
So many plot holes it’s like reading Swiss cheese
If holes and inconsistencies bother you take a pass on this one. There’s so much that is so far fetched that it becomes comical and stops being drama. And every dialogue is filled with incomplete sentences. No one speaks like that. It does convey urgency or reality. Rather it’s just sloppy and lazy writing.