Books The Whole Truth
Books and Publications Average Rating:

Rating: - OK book.
The book had a good start with double plots and things being unclear where the story would run to. Very psychological. At the end action without any rest or reflection. I could recommend it for the first 3/4 of the book.

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Rating: - Horrible
Likely one of the worst fiction books ever written. Premise, characters, sub plots simply contrived and unbelievable. I have read all of his previous works and this one is simply horrible. If it wasn't for the fact that I was on a trans-Atlantic flight with few options this book would have never been read. Much like Tom Clancy, Baldacci seems to be ridding on the crest of previous success and puts little or no work into this book.

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Rating: - Baldacci as Ian Flemming
I agree with a lot of the criticisms leveled at this book. One dimensional figures, Perils of Pauline situations, sometimes laughable dialogue...but, you know what? I really liked this book. Sometimes, you gotta just go with the James Bond type thing and enjoy it. This was one of them.

The arms business is slowing down because of the lack of cold war confrontations and concerns, so one of the major world dealers, Richard Creel decides it is time to bring back the "good old days." Crell is a Fleming character in the Goldfinger mode. His fourth wife, whom he refers to as Miss Hottie, has an aversion to clothes which will make this a fun film, if it ever goes that route.

In order to turn back the hands of time Creel hires a "perception manager." These are guys that make us think that "change' is good without ever defining it.

He also has a large gang of thugs and cut throats at his disposal to help with the acceptance of the perception his manager is trying to create.

The Bond character is named Shaw. No first name. He is wedded to a gang of international secret intellegence agency types instead of the Brits and run by a guy named Frank, instead of "M". Shaw is in love and wants out from the life he is tied to. The love object is Anna and she unwittingly gets caught up in the perception management scheme and gets killed which, as you might imagine gets Shaw's attention.

It all goes along swimmingly and ends as you might imagine, but it is still a good read for the summer and beats some of the recent efforts from this author.

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Rating: - Far fetched and silly - but not terrible
The Whole Truth is middling effort from David Baldacci. It's nowhere near as bad The Camel Club, not nearly as good as Stone Cold, slightly better than Simple Genius, and a far cry from Absolute Power.

The premise of the novel is extremely farfetched. Certainly, perception management is practiced all the time, but the magnitude of the deception in this novel is so huge and dependent upon so many variables that it's hard to accept. The story hinges on the notion that citizens of the Western world become obsessed with the plight of a Russian dissident who was allegedly murdered by the state. This struck me as highly improbable. Human rights violations occur all over the world all the time, and frankly we try not to think about it too much, particularly if that Country's economy is important to our interests.

As improbable as the whole plot seemed, it didn't really bother me. Elaborate conspiracies are to be expected in novels of this type. What really brings the novel down is the clichéd and silly characters. The villain in this novel is as cartoonish as any Bond villain and the heroes are one dimensional (and apparently invincible).

Frequent attempts to kill our heroes are predictably unsuccessful. As is often the case in these types of novels, our heroes are left for dead, only to survive by some miracle. The villain, of course, ultimately decides that he wants to personally kill our heroes, which enables them to find out who is responsible for everything that has happened when they otherwise never would have.

Don't these villains ever watch action movies? Apparently not, otherwise they wouldn't keep making the same silly mistakes that every other villain makes.

All in all, this novel isn't terrible. It moves along briskly enough and is marginally entertaining. I can't recommend it with much enthusiasm, but I suppose you could do worse. I hear the new Lee Child novel is a real stinker.