The Winner

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My main problem with this book is that I could see the pieces, parts and elements of this book while reading it rather than ever reading it as a whole work. The protagonist needs to look sympathetic, so there will be an element added…here. The villain needs to escape from this situation, so he will have this skill revealed…here. There needs to be some tension introduced, so Matthew Riggs and his mysterious past will be introduced…here. Matthew Riggs needs to have a skill that will help at this exact moment, so one will be revealed just…here. Legal Thriller - Yes Legal Plotlets - finding out whether someone is really guilty Crime Thriller - Yes Murder Mystery (killer unknown) - Yes Main Character Gender - Female The title, "The Winner," has a double significance. It obviously refers to the lottery, but what else? LuAnn Tyler is quintessential Georgia "white trash" - a young, beautiful, uneducated and unmarried mother with a typical Southern drawl living in a beat-up trailer with Duane Harvey, a no-account beer-guzzling low-life drug runner! But she is sharp enough to realize that her meaningless life is a dead end and she's trying to find a way out for her daughter. Above average plot with intricate developments, but it was missing the wow factor. Good but not great.

To let readers know where I'm coming from, my preferred genre is romance novels. The fact that I liked this should mean something since it is off genre for me. Throughout the book there was the underlying frustration of how can anyone ever stop this bad guy, but he gets it eventually. The story was excellent mechanically with good showing not telling. I would have liked more emotional draw to the characters. Not necessary, but I also would have liked more witty or thought provoking dialogue. I liked the LuAnn character a lot. She was physically very strong. Her strength of mind and body actually scared some men. I have read a few David Baldacci novels, and found them average and I don't remember much after finishing those books. This one is so bad, i will surely remember it for a long time. No more Baldacci novels for me.it came and went upon demand by its owner and varied in its intensity depending on the situation, rising to the occasion and mustering just enough reserve so that failure was never a possibility. Either you had that type of power or you A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read. How difficult to spot villain? - Story partially from villain's perspective Time/era of story: - 1980's-1999

But when she gets home to the trailer she shares with the no-good father of her child, she walks into the middle of a drug deal gone wrong. In self-defense she ends up killing a man who has just fatally stabbed her boyfriend. At least sheDavid Baldacci's authoritative legal thrillers operate on the irresistible notion that a sinister undercurrent threads through the country's most powerful institutions. And I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out that Baldacci also wanted to make a political statement about lotteries being an irresponsible regressive form of taxation that prey upon the weak represented in their totality by LuAnn and her daughter. I think Baldacci was talking about the very story that he had his reporter Donovan attempting to chase down. You know ... he could be right! David Baldacci has been writing since childhood, when his mother gave him a lined notebook in which to write down his stories. (Much later, when David thanked her for being the spark that ignited his writing career, she revealed that she’d given him the notebook to keep him quiet, "because every mom needs a break now and then.”) David Baldacci gets catchy ideas for thriller plots. In his first novel, "Absolute Power," a cat burglar robbing a mansion inadvertently witnesses a murder, committed by the president of the United States no less. In his second novel, Most of the supporting characters are cliché. Some of that I can forgive, even from a best-selling author, but that was not the worst of it.