I am not a literary snob. I do read literary fiction, but I find that I require some sort of quiet and calmness to really get into it. If I have a lot of distractions I end up rereading page after page, and that can get tiresome after a while.
Since I travel a fair ammount, if I find myself without reading material and I’m at the airport, I’ll happily buy a $8 paperback to read on the plane and in my hotel room. I can read a John Grisham novel and the constant interruptions of my neighbors and announcements, etc. make no difference as I can easily pick up where I left off in the book. Grisham is a good example of what I like in a “Beach Book” - an easy read, an interesting plot, and not too much suspension of disbelief required.
Which brings me to Baldacci. I picked up his “Stone Cold” for a trip to LA last week. He’s sold 50 million copies of his works and it’s not some genre thing with a built in audience (I’m thinking “Left Behind” here), so there must be some attraction, right? What to say? Within a few pages a major figure in the Senate is killed by a sniper, who gets away by posing as a jogger. I suppose his rifle is hidden in his sock, but lets give that a pass for now. No. lets not. The rest of the book has similar plot holes that you could drive a C-5 Galaxy loaded with a fleet of trucks through. The characters interact in scenarios that only the most bizarre series of coincidences could produce. Side stories appear and then disappear for no reason at all. The bad guys have no compunction about killing Congressmen, but when they have the protagonists in their grasp, they use Batman like tactics of killing them. The “Strapped-to-a-conveyor-belt-with-a-table-saw” technique was the only method not employed.
Capturing any bad guy results in pages of confession so contrived that I expect to turn the page and find new characters including a talking dog that say “Zoiks!” and a band of young hipsters.
I am the last person to nitpick a book or movie for continuity errors or other mistakes, but this guy doesn’t even bother trying.
Anyone care to defend him? Am I missing something here?
I didn’t even get the title right. The one I read was called “The Collectors”. I looked him up on Amazon and the reviews looked familiar. I guess it is part of a series with recurring characters.
I rented one of his books on CD for a road trip I took recently (I think that was The Collectors- it had the Library of Congress (LoC) on the cover in any case). I couldn’t get into at all, but figured it was because unlike Grisham (whose novels are mostly if not all self-contained, though he’s re-used a couple of supporting characters), the main character of the book was clearly a veteran of several other Baldacci books (ala “Jack Ryan” in Tom Clancy). I remembered a couple of major factual errors about the LoC but decided to overlook them since I’m a library geek, but I’m glad to hear it really was bad and not just “couldn’t get into it because it’s a series” thing.
I read a christmas book by him. It was OK, rather predictable and trite, but I don’t mind that in a Christmas book. But his writing wasn’t good enough that I would buy other books by him.
You reminded me of the point where a character smuggled a rare book out of the LoC by taping it to her thigh with the assistance of the Department head. Most librarians would curse you for putting tape on an Archies comic, but this guy lets a rare antiquity walk out with tape all over it.