Rating: 
Summary: A read that makes your adrenalin start to pump!!!
Review: I have just finished reading this book which although a little slow to get into, soon took me by the scruff of the neck and pushed me through it's pages towards the end. An end which you knew was sure to come but did not no when and indeed how. Should this become a film and they stick to the original plot, it will take the industry(film) by storm. I have read all but 'Saving Faith', which I hope to get hold of soon, and would class David Baldacci as one of my favourite modern day authors. I do hope that there is more of his books in the pipeline.
Rating: 
Summary: Would make a great silent movie
Review: Interesting idea, but oddly written. I'm not talking grammar and syntax, like some other reviewers. I refer to the over-the-top style. Everything is a crisis!!! On every page characters are wincing or gimacing, their throats are constricting, they cannot breathe. I spent a lot of my time rolling my eyes. Why didn't I just put it down? Good question- it is just compelling enough to keep turning those pages.
Rating:
Summary: Don't listen to the audiobook, READ IT YOURSELF!
Review: Five stars for the book, zero for the tape ... or, maybe one. But that's it. When I read the book I couldn't put it down until I finished it. It's amazing what you can do with computers nowadays. All the corruption, not knowing what's going to happen next, really awesome! When I recommended it to my Dad, he wasn't too interested at first but after reading the first chapter he was hooked. I gave it to a friend of mine to read but he thought it was really dull and got the audiocassette. We listened to it together, I thought the tape was really dull. The way David Dukes reads the voice of Sidney Archer is ridiculous, all the different accents, although they're all from the same place ... not so great. The way he reads it you don't even like the characters because their voices sound so silly.
Rating: 
Summary: 16 Year Old Suddenly Writes Book, Makes Millions!
Review: The main female character in Total Control, Sidney, is a senior partner in a major law firm but spends most of the book acting like a 14 year old. If another partner speaks to her in a way she doesn't like, she gives them a cold look and doesn't "grace them" with a response. Sidney would have trouble holding down a job as a receptionist, much less a senior partner. If Baldacci had made her smack her gum a few more times, she could easily have gone undercover in a junior high school. Baldacci has Inspector Clousseau's eye for detail. In one early scene on page 85, two characters meet at the site of an airplane crash, and Baldacci sets a new record for cramming the most inconsistencies into a single paragraph. Baldacci describes the daylight as "rapidly failing," but Lee Sawyer shows up wearing sunglasses, perhaps because in Baldacci's junior-high world on-duty cops are required to wear sunglasses at all times. George Kaplan "freezes" when he sees Sawyer then squints to try to make out who that person is a "bare five feet away." I can usually identify people from 5 feet away, but then again, I don't squint to see in the dark; I open my eyes wider. When Sawyer steps forward, Kaplan is able to identify him--from about two feet away by my reckoning--which is probably pretty good for someone who's squinting in the dark. Baldacci attended the Archie Bunker school of word choice, and selects his words more for what they sound like than what they mean. He has characters "alight into" a car. (You can't alight "into" a car; you can only alight "out of" a car.) Kaplan squints in the "rapidly failing" light. "Failing?" How about "fading?" On page 378 (which is almost as dense with hilarious inconsistencies as page 85), Baldacci reports that "a twitch erupted over Sidney's left eye." A twitch can't erupt. A twitch is minor. A "spasm" could erupt. How about just writing "Her left eyelid twitched?" Later, "Sidney struggled mightily not to perceptibly wince at the remark." Aside from the split infinitive, I think it would be as easy to notice a woman "struggling mightily" as to notice her wincing "perceptibly." Still further down the page, "Sidney felt herself trembling." What's does Baldacci mean by that? Did she reach out with one hand and feel the other hand trembling, or did she "notice" rather than "feel" that she was trembling? Throughout the book, most things happen "suddenly" as in "Steve suddenly criticized Baldacci's book on amazon.com." The book is written almost exclusively in the passive voice. The sentence construction is truly impressive in that you would never think it was possible to twist certain words into a passive formation: "Sidney's legs were put by her into the front of the car." Weird things happen with people's legs throughout the book. Lee Sawyer walks on "telephone pole size legs" (presumably Baldacci is referring to thickness, not length). In one scene, Baldacci says "Sidney's legs began walking down the street." (We never learn where the rest of her went in that particular scene.) This book requires the reader to suspend his or her disbelief, and in that it excels. You will be able to practice suspending your disbelief in laws of physics, human nature, business practices, legal procedings, police procedure, modern computing, and virtually every other topic Baldacci addresses. After reading the first 10 pages, I was surprised that the book had been published at all. After the first 50, I kept reading for the amusement of seeing characters that were so silly and a plot that was so contrived -- and because other people on the airplane had taken all the more literary reading material, such as Seventeen and Tiger Beat magazines. After 250 pages, I squinted my eyes and suddenly became convinced that Baldacci was 15 or 16 years old. The author changes voice and tense frequently, but mostly writes in third person omniscient. Readers are given full access to every thought every character in the book has for the duration of the adventure, and most of those are at the junior high level. If you read the book as a description of junior high school students role playing attorneys, FBI agents, computer programmers, and so on, it actually makes a lot of sense. Reinforcing my guess, Baldacci's word choices are mostly at about the 5th grade level, but every 3 or 4 pages he throws in a word like "brook," as in "Sidney's telephone-pole sized legs would brook no thought of walking down the street." I concluded that Baldacci was studying for the SAT as he wrote this book and worked in a lot of the words from his SAT study guide. I didn't make it all the way to the ending, but I imagine it ends something like this: Sidney's eyelids were made to coolly squint at the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. "Miranda Shmiranda," she extemporized. Her hand suddenly slapped the Chief Justice on the lower left side of his cheek. The Chief Justice immediately froze and winked with pain. "That will show him to deny my appeal," she thought to herself, smacking her gum as her legs walked down Wall Street and off into the sunset.
Rating: 
Summary: Twists and turns couldnt save this book
Review: I should say this book could be much much better. The author picks up a very typical subject- industrial espionage- and handles it wonderfully with many twists and turns. So far so good... The problem here is the heroine: Sidney Archer. He messed up the whole book with this in my opinion. I have to ask the author: How come a lawyer turned into a female rambo all of a sudden? Sidney Archer is a total nonsense. For instance how can she ever know or think of fixing the gas pedal of the auto and gettting into the house from the back? Completely ridiculuous Mr. Baldacci... I expected a more serious book. If you want some chasing scenes, this book can fit you otherwise forget it
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: This is the first book I read from baldacci, I tried it because the Amazon recommendation. It was amazing. It kept a quick pace throughout 700 pages. It was an action-filled mystery with likeable characters and plot twists. I will definately read another baldacci book and highly recommend this one!!
Rating:
Summary: sophmoric effort
Review: baldacci is a masterful storyteller; but this, his second book,belies the fact.overly long,tedious and desultory.heroine escapes death more often than the cartoon coyote survives mishaps.skipping over this one to his subsequent works is highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: A non-stop action packed mystery thriller
Review: Did I get enough adjectives into the review title? I hope so. This book deserves it. Every one of the nearly 700 pages of this book is filled with incredible intrigue and plot twists. Plane crashes, embezzlement, kidnapping, hostages, the FBI, lawyer-turned-crime solver ... it's all there. I've read hundreds of mystery novels, and this ranks in my top ten. The book was so tantalizing, that I read it in one day. Could not put it down!
Rating:
Summary: A damn fine suspense book
Review: I found this book to be the finest suspense novel I've read in a long time. The plot twists were superb, and while the ending was a tad bit disappointing, the book remained a fine page turner from beginning to end. Reviewing a book like this from a literary perspective is like expecting Mission Impossible II to be Oscar material. Did the author turn a phrase in a way my soul found uplifting? Like I cared. Did I have fun reading this book? You betcha - it is a thrilling, satisfying ride.
Rating:
Summary: sad
Review: The biggest gripe I have about this book is the quality of writing. For instance all the characters at some point in time seem to be "hitting" things. On the same page Sidney 'hits' a garage opener and later on 'hits' a button to lower her car window and 2 pages later she is again 'hitting' the button on the garage door opener. And such stereotypes! All of Mr Baldacci's heroines are good looking in the extreme and super smart to boot. Even the 2 women in Absolute Power conform to this. In this book just as the author goes overboard with the characters' physical reactions so he does with the descriptions of Sidney's beauty and smarts. Lee Sawyer spends less time thinking about the crash than he does about Sidney's looks and intelligence which, regardless of the time or circumstance, never cease to amaze him. His technical people are uniformly 'geeky' either having unkempt hair and untidy clothes (like the character in Absolute power) or are bald and pudgy (like the one in this book). His agents are old and dedicated and have dysfunctional family lives. Granted that thriller writing does not call for much by way of language skills, but any book by Archer, Forsyth or even Follett will demonstrate much, much better quality of writing without sacrificing plot or suspense. I think the main reason for his popularity is that with the ever decreasing attention span of the average reader anything more taxing than the stuff churned out by Mr Baldacci will just not be appreciated. And when writers like Tom Clancy go to extaordinary lengths to get the technolgy-related facts right why is the author insistent on writing about technology when he is manifestly not competent to do so. The sequence where Quentin Rowe tries to explain the future of computing to Lee Sawyer is so unrealistic that it is almost funny. And just what exactly is "A litany of engineering applications" that need a chip capable of carrying out 2 TIPS? This is just plain bad writing and worse proof-reading. Why would one believe that a leading law firm connects to the Internet using a modem and when did computers start displaying the available 'hard disk memory' at boot-up? Techno-thrillers are indeed a very successful genre but this is definitely not one. In short just a plain bad book
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