Simple Genius by David Baldacci

Michelle Maxwell, a tough competent ex-Secret Service agent, and Sean King, a strong good-looking, connected risk taker form an unbeatable investigative team. Normally of a robust nature, Michelle is having uncharacteristic emotional problems stemming from an unconscious repressed memory. Sean finds work investigating the death of a mathematical genius at a Virginian think tank, coincidentally across the river from a highly secret CIA property. The reader is compulsively drawn into the discovery of an autistic young girl left alone by the death of her father: the genius Monk Turing. Sean is joined by the emotionally compromised Michelle to investigate yet another suspicious death on the grounds of the think tank. Babbage Town, modeled after Bletchley Park where code breakers worked on German transmissions during World War II, form the colonized area for a computer programming think tank, or is it?

David Baldacci weaves a complex story of intrigue with likable characters, to pull the reader though the intrigue of Washington back door politics, the CIA, questionable interrogation tactics, quantum computers, the history of Camp Peary; an unacknowledged CIA property, and psychological mysteries of the personal kind.

While the book is fiction, David Baldacci uses some interesting references to real people. Charles Babbage (a name also popping up in the movies "Rain Man" and "National Treasure") is considered the father of the programmable computer. Alan Turing was a code breaker working in Bletchley Park and a genetic predecessor of the fictional Monk Turing. David Baldacci creates Champ Pollion, director of Babbage Town from real life Jean-Francois Champollion, a French linguist who worked on deciphering Egyptian codes. The Beale Cipher is an unsolved code believed to reveal an 1800's buried treasure. The idea for Simple Genius originated from the Beale Cipher mystery.