Last Man Standing
by David Baldacci
Grand Central Publishing, 2005http://www.davidbaldacci.com
An Ultra-Elite Sniper That Misses By Two Miles
Potted plot: bristling with gun porn, a colorful bunch of enormous superbad cops and crooks charge around Washington DC and Virgina horse country. There are conspiracies and posturing, heavy-handed hints that perhaps X or Y is the leak within the FBI. Last Man Standing has a love interest and at one point a hottie in a swimsuit, but very little bad langauge or sex. Oh! And a brief appearance by a topless porn star with breasts so enormous they almost hide her abdomen.
Highlights include a vintage Corvette convertable with BTO blasting out of its speakers as it races up I95. Most of the novel's fun bits were provided by Italian-American sidekick Paulie Romano. Also, an interesting hint at where super-secret undercover FBI men can hide documents in plain sight. The information on how the FBI's ultra-elite Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) train for missions was interesting.
But did Baldacci have to leave every last bit of his research in the novel? The result is tedious and bloated. All these irrelevant lengthy asides... trivia about buildings on horse farms and lengthy descriptions of the trailers? Come on! And every macho man is invariably compared to a football player. And every other sentence contains the word "gaze."Similar repetition is seen establishing and developing character: yes, Web London has survivor's guilt. Got that. Got it on the first go around. Don't need to have it explained again and again. Oh, so Web was hypnotized by the crooked FBI psychiatrist? Hmm. OK, picked that straight up too. Baldacci's hints are dropped as heavily as giant drug kingpin Big F's fists. There were a lot of points where I shook my head and said, "Golly! I hope that's not supposed to be the big twist that is coming when I finally slog my way through to this novel's climax."
Getting to that climax really exercises suspension of disbelief. One character will make a discovery or fall into danger, and then in the next chapter, a hundred miles away, Web London will realize as if by ESP, "Hmmm, well just hypothetically suppose that my sexy psychiatrist Dr. Claire Daniels has been kidnapped. That would mean that the big baddie is actually X, who would theoretically have taken her to the unexpected, unlikely location Y. I had better pick up my Remington M-40A1 .308 sniper rifle and race over there right now!"
Even worse is the leprechaun of an Irish stereotype that is Web London's father. And, in one section the man is supposed to be barely literate, and the next he's a smooth-talking businessman? It's inconsistent.
The whole shebang's fairly crap, actually.
whoo hoo
Critical Mick says: Last Man Standing reads like a Jerry Bruckheimer / Michael Bay film that is so bad, it went beyond Straight-to-Video and into Straight-to-Novelization. I was amazed by its graceless, contrived prose as David Baldacci came across well during an interview at the 2007 National Book Festival. Perhaps, like Harlan Coben's Hold Tight this title is a glitch.
|
