Last Man Standing

Last Man Standing has the essential elements of a terrific David Baldacci novel: a tough but tender-hearted hero, dirty dealings in the nation's bureaucracy, and a roller-coaster plot. Web London, a member of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, froze up on a drug raid and thus became the sole survivor of a remote-controlled ambush that killed six of his compatriots. Now the only witness has disappeared and the inside man on the botched raid has gone underground.

As a pretty psychiatrist puzzles over the corners of Web's brain that kept him alive, Web himself stays on the move. He's certain that the ambush is connected to the prison escape of a neofascist leader, Ernest B. Free, whom he helped arrest five years earlier, and a series of new murders leads him to a Virginia horse farm and the driving force behind all the carnage. It may seem as though Baldacci gives away the mastermind too soon, but both the bad guys and the good guys are complex enough that there's plenty of punch all the way to the last page. --Barrie Trinkle