Simple Genius is Simply Silly
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Author: David Baldacci
Title: Simple Genius Genre: thriller There's an old joke involving the first humans on Mars: the astronauts come upon a couple of Martians stirring something in a large pot. Upon being asked what they're doing, the Martians reply that they're making a baby. Sure enough, after many hours of stirring, a tiny green baby appears. For the sake of science, a male and female astronaut agree to demonstrate for the Martians how humans reproduce. When the couple are ready for the stereotypical cigarette, one of the Martians asks, "Where is the baby?" When told that it takes nine months for the baby to grow, the Martian looks puzzled and asks, "Then why were they in such a hurry there at the end?" A big hurry, indeed... In need of a quick infusion of cash to keep his partner, Michelle "Mick" Maxwell out of stir¹, ex-Secret Serviceman Sean King finds himself begging for scraps from the table of former lover-slash-partner Joan Dillinger's high-end security firm. That's how he finds himself prowling around a Virginia think tank-full of high-tech geniuses, trying to figure out how one of the resident eggheads ended up dead inside the fence of the CIA facility across the river - Camp Peary, widely, though not affectionately, known as "The Farm." While Maxwell chafes under the tender ministrations of a psychiatric hospital (part of that little "keep-her-out-of-jail" action), King makes precious little headway beyond tripping over yet another suspiciously dead body. Between hitting on the gorgeous, lonely wife of the chief of the CIA facility in local bars and attempting to bond with the orphaned daughter of the first victim - a bona fide savant in her own weird way - King has essentially gotten nowhere. Good thing Maxwell decides to check out of the funny farm AMA and come join her partner... Clearly something is amiss across the river from Babbage Town, the converted estate where all those geniuses are slaving away to invent quantum computers and a shortcut to factoring huge numbers into primes (something the child, Viggie² Turing, seems to be able to do in her head). There must be a spy, but who is it? and where is he hiding? and how is he getting the information out? And why was the late Monk Turing snooping around The Farm, perhaps one of the most closely-guarded facilities on the face of the Earth? Did it have something to do with the intercontinental jet flights that land, like clockwork, every Saturday night? Or might it have something to do with the history of the land that the government snatched away from poor sharecroppers to create The Farm? A little child shall lead them - which is a good idea, because neither Maxwell nor King seems to be all that smart... Back for the third time, after Split Second and Hour Game in Simple Genius (strange that author David Baldacci decided not to go with a title in the time motif for Simple Genius), protagonists Michelle Maxwell and Sean King have morphed into something approaching a couple by now. Oddly, neither seems ready to admit the chemistry, though everyone else seems to remark on it... With no more POTUS to protect in either case, King and Maxwell have turned to the relatively mundane world of solving mysteries. They generally take on highly organized adversaries, of course, as befits their superior level of skill. Speaking of levels of skill, however, one must glare at author David Baldacci - that veritable machine for churning out plots paced at NASCAR-level speeds. Like his prior novels (including The Camel Club and The WInner), his latest features a complex web of subplots that ultimately yields the multiple climaxes for which Baldacci is renowned - or perhaps "infamous." In this particular case, there's the plot of "why is Michelle suicidal?" running in the background as the twin plots of "why are people dying in Babbage Town?" and "what the heck's going on in Camp Peary?" churn along in the foreground. Happily, Michelle's involvement with a psychiatrist brings that character to Babbage Town to deal with the troubled Viggie (who - naturally - bonds with the equally though not at all similarly troubled Mick). Though said by some reviewers to create characters with whom readers instantly identify, Baldacci's characters have always seemed cardboard cutouts to me. Excepting the protagonist partners and perhaps the Harley-riding shrink, everyone else is readily identifiable by a single characteristic: there's sexy Valerie, brainy Champ, one-legged Alicia, dangerous Ian... As for his returning characters, King and Maxwell always seem a little too perfect to me: tall, athletic, gorgeous, brainy - though that last is readily called into question by their inability to find a hidden room they suspect in a mansion (and Baldacci's eventual description of determining its location is equally suspect: if you can't get into one room on a floor, how can you determine whether not all the space on that floor is accounted for?). And then there are the little codes Viggie's father "stashed" with her: how can someone not recognize the tune of "Shenandoah"? Rubbish. Perhaps the most telling shortcoming of Simple Genius, however, is the way in which it calls to mind the punch line of that old joke: how come everyone's in such a hurry at the end? If you ask me, it's because Baldacci is trying to bedazzle readers so that they won't notice that he's thrown in every hackneyed convention but the kitchen sink. Chock-full of double- and triple-crosses, hidden agendas, and ridiculously unfounded surprise twists, Simple Genius relies on tiring the reader out with whiz-bang action instead of entertaining him. Me, I prefer entertainment - if I want to get tired, I'll go for a run. ¹ Groan... ² Short for (Blaise de) Vigenère, famous French cryptographer and (re-)inventor of the eponymous polyaphabetic cipher. Strange: this is the third book I've read in recent weeks to cite the Vigenère cipher, and the second consecutive book to go into the details of the Enigma Code, Bletchley Park, and Project Mincemeat - not to mention Alan Turing. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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