Rating: 
Summary: Very bad idea
Review: Baldacci's handling of psychology has never been strong. He creates brilliant, complex plots that draw you in, and he is ingenious in developing and resolving them. But his characters' actions rarely--if ever--emerge from the portryal of their psychologies. More often, his characters are like chess pieces--emotionless ciphers that Baldacci just moves around as he needs. That's often fine--genre fiction is almost never "character driven," and if the plot doesn't turn on anything psychological, the lack of character-driven developments need not be a problem. But given his evident lack of psychological facility, it was a very, very bad idea for Baldacci to make a psychiatrist a main character, as he does here. Claire Daniels is so grotesquely and ridiculously incompetent that she would not pass a first-year psychology practicum, much less a psychiatric residency and board certification. She lectures, hectors, changes the subject, listens with a tin ear, can't stay on task--and her understanding of psychology seems derived mostly from very bad self-help books. That makes this book just unbearably grating. I put this book down forever about three hundred pages into it. Yeah, I wanted to know how the plot would develop and resolve, but I found the psychological ineptitude just impossible to tolerate.
Rating: 
Summary: Words should take you somewhere
Review: What we have here is a good subject matter, a good outline of events, an interesting twist at the end, and an author that doesn't know when to shut up. I'm still not quite sure why I finished the book. There are more pages here that I can't figure out WHY they are there except to make the book longer. You could cut out over 70% and then maybe have a good story. If you decide to get this one, I hope you read faster than I do.
Rating:
Summary: It's Not Absolute Power...
Review: This is only the second book by David Baldacci that I've read. Absolute Power was gripping. In this book, I liked the hero, Web London, up to a point. I was hoping that his personal life would take more of an upward turn in the end, but maybe there's a sequel in the works? Given how the book stopped, there should be something in the works, since the ending was very disappointing. In addition, as has been pointed out, the book was too long and the plotting, while good, could have been tighter. While I was reading, I kept thinking that the writing was awfully ham-handed, and that description and dialogue could have been better written. I kept thinking that the tone was "macho guy writing." Even where the hero IS a macho guy, that doesn't need to bleed over into every aspect of the writing. If this book were in the first person, the tone would have made the narrator a caricature. There was also a lot of detail that, while it showed obvious research into a topic, didn't need to be in the story. It didn't advance anything, and tended to stop the action dead while I wondered what the point was. One irritant (for me) - several times he referred to FBI agents as being woefully underpaid. I agree. However, to say that the pay was somehow equivalent to that of a cashier at K-Mart was, I thought, a bit much. He made it sound like any agent who had a family had to be on food stamps as well. All of the people who do the kind of work described in the book, from military special forces of all kinds through SWAT teams and the Hostage Rescue Team, are underpaid. But to equate the pay to that of a K-Mart cashier was, as you can tell, incredibly annoying to me (unless K-Mart cashiers are making a lot more than I think they are). Maybe that was part of what I found wrong with the book as well - that the author's use of hyperbole (the K-Mart example isn't the only one) was a bit much. Would I read Baldacci again? Maybe - I started The Winner but couldn't finish it, although I have friends who recommend it highly. Was this book a total write-off? No, not really. I'd recommend it as a summer beach read. There are better and there are worse. It got off to a decent start, although it fizzled at the end. Overall, I liked the story, but I think the writing could have been better, the book shorter, and the story tighter. If you want to read a gripping story about the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, I'd recommend Christopher Whitcomb's book, Cold Zero: Inside the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. Interesting, better written, and it has the advantage of being true.
Rating:
Summary: Success does not breed success
Review: A very poorly executed book which did not do justice to a plot with great potential, this book was very disappointing. Full of half-baked cliches and undeveloped characters, it is the last Baldacci book I buy.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book!
Review: My husband and I listened to this on a trip over the holidays. We both could not wait to get back in the car to listen to the rest of the book. Lots of interesting twists. We truly enjoyed it!
Rating: 
Summary: Hummm...
Review: Okay, this is an interesting book. I looked forward to buying it for a long time (my library never had it). When I finally bought it, I read three or four pages and got disappointed in how boring it seemed. Routines and SOP and blah blah blah. I put it aside and moved on. I reluctantly came back to it and enjoyed it... until the pointless horse ranch interlude. It took way too much time and took me out of the story. Then, it started to get better again. And the whole thing is ruined in the last chapter by one of the worst endings I've ever read. So it's an okay book, but I wish I'd waited for it from the library.
Rating:
Summary: Not up to his standards
Review: I have read and enjoyed most of Baldacci's books. This one was so contrived that the ending was a little tough to get to. So many twists and turns that I think even he got lost.
Rating:
Summary: Needs to take writing 101
Review: Good guys, bad guys--black /white, no shades of gray. Lots of passive writing style.
I've never seen such two dimensional characters in a book that is so popular.
His use of English is very amateurish--I was tripping over his writing style--very distracting -- I had no empathy for any of his characters.
I'm a Clancy, Ludlum, Follet fan with a taste for Stephen King sometimes. They are master storytellers with wonderful grasp of the English language. Their characters are three dimensional and have complexity.
Baldacci's characters make comic books look like classics.
Rating:
Summary: i'm stunned!
Review: stunned by the negative reviews of this fabulous book...i shared this with four other people, male and female, who all thought it was completely engrossing. i listened to this via audiotape, and i found myself sitting in my car, waiting to hear what happened next.
i agree, it ranges far and wide; but the research on each subject, from horse trailers to inner-city life, was interesting and entertaining.
i've read "saving faith", "absolute power", "the winner", and "the associate" and
this - just in my opinion, now - is far and away the best.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent thriller
Review: I found this book to be a wonderful book to be able to lose yourself in. The suspense in the book made it very difficult to put the book down. As the author takes you through the world of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, you see the reality of these people and what they go through, even through fiction. This is one of the few books that was not predictable and kept me in suspense until the very end. I really appreciate the detail behind the methods, weapons and policies the author explained. David Baldacci really did his research before publishing and I commend him on that.
| 
