Atlee Pine

About the Atlee Pine series

Atlee Pine is an FBI special agent working the Bureau's most remote territory — the rural Southwest — whose entire career has been shaped by one unsolved trauma: as a child, she watched her twin sister Mercy get abducted, and Mercy was never found. David Baldacci opens the series with Pine chasing present-day cases (a mine disappearance, a serial-killer investigation) while the cold case of Mercy's kidnapping runs underneath every book, finally taking center stage as Pine goes rogue to find the truth herself. It's a more personal, psychologically driven series than many of Baldacci's other thrillers, built around one investigator's decades-long search for closure as much as any individual case.

The series is short but tightly serialized — only four books, with the abduction mystery resolving by the final one — and includes a direct crossover with Baldacci's John Puller series in Daylight (2020), where Pine and Puller's investigations intersect. It's a good fit for readers who want a female-led FBI thriller with a strong emotional throughline rather than a purely case-of-the-week structure.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with Long Road to Mercy (2018). Unlike many long-running thriller series, Atlee Pine tells one serialized story across all four books — the search for her abducted twin sister Mercy — so it should be read in strict order, ending with Mercy (2021), which resolves the central mystery.

Daylight (2020), the third book, is a direct crossover with Baldacci's John Puller series; reading the first two Puller novels isn't required, but knowing who Puller is going in helps that book land.