It's amazing how this happens over and over again. A writer gets a little famous, and then he gets some money, and then he starts pumping out a book every 9 months or so and guess what? All of them are terrible.
In this particular instance of suckitude, Baldacci simply does a little rip-off of Jack Reacher and dances a little Machiavellian jig about an unrealistically drawn billionaire defense contractor with evil designs on what he sees as the corrupt political hegemony that refuses to realize how safe we were back in the good old days of the Cold War. Through an unrelenting series of episodes of entirely overblown violence, gratuitous bloodshed, and plot coincidences that leave one gasping at their transparency, the novel somehow manages to stagger to a conclusion that leaves the world intact. Though I will confess that I actually did finish the book, I am almost embarrassed to admit it, and did so only under the influence of the same theory on which I force my children to finish their dinners (i.e., the somewhat suspect theory that you should always finish what you started). The only good thing about the book is that Baldacci killed off the hero's love interest before she could further entertain us with her fluency in 15 languages and multiple Ph.D's in various esoteric sciences, which of course are known to always go hand-in-hand with the storybook good looks of the highest paid runway models. Bang, bang, she's dead, thank God.
Although pop fiction can be amazingly bad, this book is almost a parody of how low it can go. Let me count the ways: Awful. Bad. Cretinous. Defective. Enervating. Feeble. Gross. Hideous. Insipid.
I can't think of a pejorative word starting with the letter J offhand, so I will simply end my review here. If it hadn't already sold a million+ copies, I'd tell you not to buy it, but I guess it's too late.Get more detail about The Whole Truth.
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