Finished Reading David Baldacci's The Collectors

After skipping from the first to the fourth in his five-volume (so far) Camel Club series, I decided to go back to David Baldacci's second book The Collectors with the hope of realigning myself into the "proper order".  Still, I already know some crucial things that won't unfold until the third book, titled Stone Cold.  After finishing The Collectors, I am especially glad that I didn't read book three first, as the ending evidently flows directly into the next book.  I would have been lost had I skipped around further.

Having said that, I found The Collectors to be a worthy successor to volume one, which was also titled The Camel Club.  John Carr, the protagonist ex-CIA agent with the assumed name of Oliver Stone, once again finds himself embroiled in shady goings-on in the Washington, D.C. area among the various national security agencies there, this time with the Library of Congress being a murder site.  A mystery involving spies passing secrets to enemies combines in this book with the introduction of a "new" character named Anabelle, with whom I am already familiar after reading book four, titled Divine Justice.  She is an expert con artist who runs afoul of a major underworld gangster after conning him out of forty million dollars.  But to see how that subplot resolves itself, I'll have to read Stone Cold.

In The Collectors, Oliver Stone and his three pals in the crime-busting Camel Club once again work to solve assorted mysteries while trying to avoid kidnapping, torture, and imminent death.  My pleasure in reading Baldacci's books in this series, however, derives more from his characters and how they relate to one another than the action and adventure.  I haven't considered any of the three books I've covered so far to be especially deep or memorable, but they were enjoyable experiences nonetheless.  Maybe you'd think so as well, so why not start with book one, The Camel Club?