The Last Family I'd Want to Be In!
Amazon says:
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Author: David Baldacci
Title: First Family Genre: thriller Twelve-year-old Willa Dutton has gone missing; snatched from her suburban Virginia home by heavily-armed men who left her mother lifeless on the kitchen floor. What sets this apart from your ordinary Amber Alert is that Willa's aunt Jane just happens to live in a big White House in Washington, DC. If the First Lady's favorite niece has been snatched, it's gotta be Eye-rainian terrorists, right? Wrong. Sam Quarry's home-grown, and he's not a terrorist; or at least he doesn't think he is. Instead, he's the man with the plan - and the plan is pure and simple revenge. As luck would have it, the kidnapping was nearly foiled by ex-Secret Service agents turned PI Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, who'd been called to the Dutton home on unspecified business. Since the two are already in the loop and, more importantly, since King has a personal relationship with First Lady Jane Cox; they're automatically on the case. That makes neither the FBI nor the Secret Service happy, but, then, King and Maxwell have never been good at making people happy... From his decaying antebellum mansion in Alabama, Quarry masterfully manipulates the First Lady and, through her, PoTUS himself. With virtually no clues - and, more to the point, no apparent motive for the kidnapping - the authorities are baffled; and so are our heroes. Will the pair unravel the mystery in time to put a stop to Quarry's plan, whatever that might be? Chances are, it's gonna be close... King and Maxwell return for fourths in David Baldacci's latest thriller, First Family; their first appearance since successfully recognizing the tune to Shenandoah and thereby solving the mystery in Baldacci's previous low-budget thriller, Simple Genius (the two first appeared together in 2003's Split Second and later in Hour Game). In the intervening couple of years, Baldacci's apparently been obsessed with Camels and Oliver Stone... but I digress. The protagonists are, per convention, as smart as they are deadly and as deadly as they are fine-looking; a potent set of skills for private eyes. It's also as hackneyed as the day is long; but apparently no one wants to read thrillers about pot-bellied, balding men and frumpy, frigid women - those attributes are reserved for the civil servants, such as FBI agents. It might help if either of the two was likeable, but that would be like deciding to "friend" a cardboard box on facebook. Baldacci being Baldacci, about a third of First Family has nothing to do with the First Family: it's a secondary plot about the murder of Maxwell's mother, her suspicion that her father is the culprit, and her recovery of a set of nasty memories from her childhood. I'll make no bones about it: the plot line is pure filler, doing little more than adding 100-150 pages to the book. Perhaps it'll be cut when Reader's Digest does the abridged version? Typically for Baldacci, the author's invented a villain who bears a species of twisted genius. In the case of First Family, evil mastermind Sam Quarry is an unschooled Alabama cotton farmer, a pilot in Vietnam, who is some sort of mechanical savant - the kind of guy who can tear down, fix, and rebuild any mechanical contraption with a pocket knife and an oily rag (think Will Smith's character in Seven Pounds). Since the villain's from Alabama, it also goes without saying that there's a streak of insanity in his family (what novel about the south doesn't feature a whack-job relative locked up in the attic?). Whether being a natural mechanical genius has anything to do with microelectronics or not (though I doubt it), Baldacci's villain is clearly a whack-job; driven mad by personal tragedy - and maybe by the Alabama heat. Quarry's revenge plot is, however, full of holes - and that means that the plot of First Family doesn't hold much water, either. As is often the case, the author hasn't researched some critical details; and the thrilling conclusion rests uncomfortably on a pile of coincidences and skipped details. Combine that with a pair of plastic protagonists and one more in a seemingly endless line of "ruthless politician" plotlines, and this book does little to deserve praise. It seems I always find myself saying something like this about the King and Maxwell series: I don't buy First Family's premise; I don't buy its villain's motivation; and I don't buy Baldacci's concept. I advise you not to buy the book. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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