Z/Web

Author: David Baldacci

This is a strange book. I can’t say I really liked it. There are two problems with it. First, it’s basically split into two plots that have no relation at all. In the main plot, which is the interesting one, the First Lady’s niece has been kidnapped. In the second plot, our two heros, former Secret Service agents turned private detectives, Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, return to Michelle’s hometime because her mother has died and, of course, it turns out to be murder. I really didn’t care about the second storyline at all — it was too convenient having her mother murdered and she being a private eye, and the resolution of that story with all the family drama was terribly tedious and uninteresting and melodramatic.

The second big problem is that the reason for the kidnapping is saved as the big reveal until the very end of the book. Now that reason is actually interesting and quite dramatic, but it takes us 500 pages of boredom to get there. Instead, we must wallow through pages of inept mystery, tedium where shady people are doing mysterious things and every conversation is obtuse with all the key details carefully omitted so that the author can save the secret until the very end.

What’s really weird is that I didn’t realize this book was part of a series, nor that the new TV series King and Maxwell is based on these books, until I started in on this book and thought I was losing my mind! I’d just started watching the TV show and was freaking out a little at the similarities until I realized what was going on. The sad part is that I like the TV series much better: the characters have a repartee and distinct personalities. In this book, these two could have been anybody.

Worse, much of the “drama” of the detectives is based on their vague history and personal stories, which I didn’t know and didn’t really care about. To give you one example, the book opens with a dramatic burglary as Michelle breaks into her psychiatrist’s office and steals all her files. Then she throws them away without looking at them. As the reader, we’re left baffled. I don’t even realize that this woman is our main private detective hero, so I don’t know what’s going on. There’s mystery there, but it’s not interesting: just the author withholding information. And he does it badly: the files aren’t mentioned again until almost the last page of the novel!

The bottom line is that the whole novel is a mess of vague happenings, like watching people doing stuff from a mile away in the dark. You know something is going on, and it might be significant and interesting, but you can’t even see enough to know that. Sure, there are a few cool scenes, and I liked some aspects of the search for the kidnapped niece, and our head bad guy was also an unusual character, but because so much info is withheld we really can’t know anybody in the story: everyone is a mystery. The result is we don’t care about anyone or anything, and when you finally get to the end, the feeling is one of “Oh well, so that’s it.” A superior way to write this is to make the reader think they have all the info, and only reveal more at the end. Doing it this way is just cruel and unusual punishment.