Split Second

Split Second (King & Maxwell #1) by David Baldacci

This book was so bad, so poorly written, so, so, so massively wrong that I wonder if I had a bad copy, that an unedited version somehow made its way to my Kindle. I just can’t believe that a novel that sold so well, that began a very popular series which led to a television show, was so bad. Split Second was barely readable. In fact, I only finished it because my wife and I had decided to read it together.

The first novel of the King & Maxwell series, Split Second follows two disgraced Secret Service agents. One, Sean King, was caught looking away when the presidential candidate he was guarding was assassinated. The other, Michelle Maxwell, allowed the presidential candidate she was guarding to be alone in a room for a few minutes; he was kidnapped. It is obvious that the two cases would wind up connected to each other. That’s fine. The book has good premise, something that could serve as the base for an engrossing tale. Unfortunately, Split Second deteriorated into absurdity.

My overall impression of the novel is that it reads like a young adult or early teen detective story. Everything is fully explained as if the reader is not expected to figure out things for him or herself. This style leads to the dragging out of many storylines that a reader should figure out fairly quickly. One of the major ones is what exactly distracted Agent King while his candidate was killed. About 20% into the novel, I told my wife what I thought that distraction was. She said, “No. That’s what he wants you to think, but it wouldn’t be something that stupid.” Around the 40% mark, it became clear that no other explanation was possible, and it was confirmed later in the novel. And, yes, it really was that stupid.

I’ve said this about other books I’ve reviewed, but Split Second is a logistical nightmare. The author does a poor job of establishing and maintaining point of view, so much of the narration is a mess. For example, federal investigators in Virginia make preparations to storm a bunker in Tennessee. Instead of flying there, they drive five hours. Why?

Baldacci’s text also demonstrates poor critical thinking skills in his characters. King and Maxwell, we are told, are brilliant investigators. Much of the time, though, they come across as stupid. In one scene, Michelle Maxwell is searching through an old hotel that was abandoned 7 years prior. She found a phone book in the abandoned office, but was disappointed to find it was out of date. What, did she expect Ma Bell to continue its delivery to the abandoned building? Within the novel, we read through the investigators’ thoughts, we experience the processes that take them from clue to conclusion. Often, the conclusions are correct—Baldacci thinks they are brilliant, remember—while the leaps that got the investigators there are utterly stupid. In short, he tells us they are good while showing the opposite to be true.

There was no reason for Split Second to be as long as it was. The most common narrative trick the author used was: I’ve discovered something, but I’m not going to tell you now; I’m going to tell you later, but before I can tell you, I’ll be drugged, kidnapped, or knocked unconscious. That got old…quickly.

The dumbest thing about the book was that forensics and actual law enforcement tactics have no place within it. A few seconds after the assassination, Sean King shot the man who killed his candidate. The investigations within Split Second reveal that there was a second person at the scene with a gun. That person made a point to hide the gun, pay blackmail fees to a woman who saw him hide it, and then spend years contriving all of the foolishness that makes up the plot. The question that’s never asked in the book—let’s face it; had it been asked, the author would have had to think up another plot—is why the gun was an issue at all. It was neither pulled nor fired at the scene. Nothing criminal occurred with it, and there is no proof of anything involving it. In real life, that gun is a nothing; in the pseudo-plot of Split Second, it was everything. That doesn’t work for me.

In some cases, Baldacci writes King and Maxwell coming to conclusions that are scientifically impossible. For example: “She rewound the tape again and listened intently. There it was, like a beep or a clang, or a ding. That was it. A ding! It was coming from the direction where King was staring.” So Michelle Maxwell has the ability to tell sound direction from watching a VHS tape? That was almost as bad as the cold fusion bomb in JJ Abrams’ latest Star Trek film.

This book was awful. It was so awful that I almost want to read the second King & Maxwell book to see if this was an anomaly. If you’re looking for a good, exciting, smart thriller, stay away from Split Second.

F

How Green this Land, How Blue this Sea

How Green this Land, How Blue this Sea by Mira Grant

Upon finishing, the first thing that sticks out to me about this Newsflesh novella is how well Mira Grant writes through Mahir. He is a great narrating character. Travelling throughout zombie-infested Australia in his head was a fun experience that reiterated how much I hated reading from Shaun’s point of view in Deadline and Blackout.

The best thing about How Green this Land, How Blue this Sea is Grant’s portrayal of Australia. It was a different type of environment than any of the other settings for the Newsflesh series. Post-zombie apocalypse Australia is a place where people refuse to trade in their freedoms for protections. The people there don’t live with the same fear and isolation that is experienced in the North America and Europe of Grant’s world. It was a different atmosphere with a different feel. It helped to show how the world she created is an actual diaspora, not a monolith of fear and undead.

Although this was a rather short piece, Grant managed to include a few interesting ideas. The most significant is what her Australians have done with the rabbit-proof fence. All in all, I’d say this was a very thoughtful story. Great companion to the series.

A-

Perfect Rivals

Perfect Rivals: Notre Dame, Miami, and the Battle for the Soul of College Football by Jeff Carroll

This book was a huge letdown. I knew the book was published by ESPN Books, so I thought it might actually be a mostly objective, unbiased account. That was naivety on my part. I should have done more research before reading it—I should have known going in that it was written by an Indiana guy who writes for a South Bend newspaper. Had I known, I would have never begun reading it.

I found author Jeff Carroll to be very fair when it came to describing former Miami coach Jimmy Johnson (but for every positive or neutral thing he had to say about Johnson, he had three negative things to say about his successor, Dennis Erickson). I thought his writing was rather impartial in a lot (but not all) of the discussion about Notre Dame football. That was it, though. Everything else was a mixture of cultural bias, bowing at the altar of the Golden Dome, and poor knowledge of the game of football. There was also plenty of misinformation produced by either lazy research or piss poor fact-checking.

The full title was Perfect Rivals: Notre Dame, Miami, and the Battle for the Soul of College Football. That title would lead a prospective reader to believe he/she was about to read about the classic battles between the two teams in 1988, 1989, and 1990 as well as the significance those games had on the state of college football. Nope. The 1990 game was treated as a near afterthought. Not much time was given to the 1989 game (Miami won the national championship that season). Carroll spent a good deal of time on the 1988 game, but it wasn’t the book’s centerpiece. I don’t understand that decision. That game should be the centerpiece of any non-school specific book about college football in the 1980s. Perfect Rivals was about the two teams who played in that game, yet it was, in my opinion, given a lower billing than what was warranted. A more accurate subtitle would have been How Lou Holtz took risks and brought Notre Dame back to the pinnacle of college football just in time to sign an exclusive television contract with NBC.

One of the more darkly ironic moments comes when Carroll rants about Bill McCartney’s Colorado Buffaloes, specifically accusations of rape and the coach’s non response to them. Carroll could have written the same things about his own beloved school.

But Carroll seems to buy into the Notre Dame myth. This passage, quoted in the book from Inside Sports magazine sums up the myth:

College football needs Notre Dame, and the Irish have resurfaced just in time. In an era when the concepts of athletic excellence and academic integrity fit together like White Snake and Bing Crosby, there is no better time for major college football’s most famous symbol of athletic integrity to be on top of the football polls…Who knows? Perhaps Notre Dame’s football resurgence will bring the academic ideal back into style. Perhaps integrity will be the game’s next popular fad, like four-receiver sets or steroids.

My biggest issue with the book was the constant peppering of ignorant culturally based statements. Predictably, I disagreed with nearly 100% of what Carroll had to say about the Hurricanes’ performances on and off the field leading up to the 1987 Fiesta Bowl. But that stuff turned out to be mild. About the Islamic Clara Muhammad School in Newark, New Jersey, which Raghib Ismail attended as a child, Carroll wrote, “It is a relic of the time period that a black man would choose to navigate the world as a Muslim rather than as an African American ancestor of slaves in America.” That statement demonstrates a severe lack of knowledge. A few paragraphs later, Carroll described the Ismails’ move from Newark to Wilkes-Barre: “There was one condition: that the boys attend a Protestant church, not a mosque…On another positive note…”

Carroll’s poor use of transitions give the reader a sense that he just doesn’t care about the players as people. “Rice’s career had ended without a second national championship. Without the Heisman. Without a place at the highest level of the sport. In this darkest of moments, however, true Irish believers could take solace in the famous line from the school’s fight song. ‘Old Notre Dame will win overall,’ it went, and it was about to be proven true in a way that would rattle the college football world to its very core and change Notre Dame’s reputation forever.” Who cares that Tony Rice wasn’t drafted? Who cares what his future held? Notre Dame was about to sign a huge TV deal, and the Irish faithful were elated. Give me a break.

The presentation of untruths was the book’s biggest blemish. A 1987 Pitt loss to Temple was described as “the ultimate indignity” because Temple had “gone winless in eleven games” the previous season. In real life, the 1986 Temple Owls were a 6-5 team. Those 6 wins were forfeited in 1988 after it was revealed that a Temple player had played that season after taking money from an agent. The truth paints an entirely different picture over Pitt’s loss to Temple and whatever baggage the players would carry from that loss into their game with Notre Dame. Carroll also wrote about Michael Irvin, “Johnson’s volatile former ‘Cane, whom the Cowboys had nearly given up on by the time Johnson arrived.” No. When Jimmy Johnson arrived in Dallas, Irvin had just completed a rookie season during which he led the NFC in yards per reception after being selected 11th overall in the draft. The Cowboys were elated with him then. They considered moving on from him after his second season, Johnson’s first in Dallas, because they were unsure he’d be able to recover from an injury. The one that bothered me the most was a statement about how the BCS led to a split national championship in 1997 even though it was supposed to prevent that sort of thing. The BCS did not exist prior to 1998, so I don’t know how Carroll holds it responsible for Michigan and Nebraska sharing the championship.

Bad information and poor fact-checking make me doubt everything I read in a work. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know what the author failed to understand or what he/she misrepresented to an exaggerated degree. This is a history book, but I cannot trust the history it gave me. Overall, I feel that Perfect Rivals was a waste of my time.

D

The Forever War

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

The Forever War is that rare novel that begins with a fairly strong start and continuously gets better until it ends. It was enjoyable and thought provoking. I’ve read several reviews that suggest The Forever War’s time has come and gone or that its time has come, gone, and come back again due to the cyclical nature of life. I disagree. It is, in my opinion, a timeless classic. When, in the course of human history, have themes of upward mobility, senseless war, politically created enemies, conscription, and veteran life ever been irrelevant to current life? The Forever War is one of the best war novels and one of the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read. It is technical and emotional. It exercises the brain. And it tugs at the heart.

Haldeman’s plot follows William Mandella as he leaves earth to train for war against a recently discovered “enemy” from a foreign planet. Mandella’s story takes us through many planets and star systems to fight war against the Taurans. As we follow Mandella’s path, Haldeman touches on many topics: homosexuality, poverty, crime, corruption, the meaning and concept of home, and others.

Interstellar travel puts the soldiers on a different time scale than those who remain on one planet. The first time Mandella returns to earth, he finds his mother an old woman and life on his home planet much different than it was when he first left. For him and his team, it is a different world. This is an area in which Haldeman’s text shines.

The novel features a great deal of science, both in jargon and in the use of real and fictional (speculative) science. It works for me. The science was neither silly nor just shoe-horned in. It all makes sense. It would be very easy for poor science to turn a military science-fiction story into something silly and cartoonish. At no point does The Forever War seem in danger of taking that fall. This is a real world type of novel, and Haldeman’s science helps reinforce it.

At its heart, though, I think The Forever War is a love story. A serious adult love story. It is not a story about smitten lovers who gaze into each other’s eyes and see milk, honey, and heaven. No, these are real world people who have a real world love and deal with real world problems. What is their place in the world? Can they afford to be together? Will their jobs allow them to be with each other? William and his woman are, quite literally, star-crossed lovers. Haldeman avoids caricaturizing their relationship. Instead, he stays true to it and, without ostentation and loud warning bells, creates something endearing and heartfelt. That relationship, that love story, is what I will think of first when I think of The Forever War.

What a great, great book.

A+

Gone Girl

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Told in three parts, Gone Girl tells the story of the marriage of Amy Elliott and Nick Dunne. While reading Book 1, one gets the feeling that Nick is the story’s protagonist. By the time I reached Book 2, I realized that the actual protagonist is the marriage. More specifically, the lead role is that of the conch of power within the marriage.

In some ways, this is the most horrifying of Flynn’s novels. Whereas Sharp Objects and Dark Places occur decades after the horror that initiates the action, Gone Girl takes you through all of the horror as it happens. It’s good, but it could have been great.

Gone Girl is Gillian Flynn’s third novel. It was very much a Gillian Flynn novel. I like it, but I did not love it. I probably would have liked it a lot more if I hadn’t read both of Flynn’s first two novels. I might’ve enjoyed it more had I read it without knowing who wrote it. This was a novel whose impression on me was damaged by my familiarity with the author. Throughout Book 1, I felt I knew what was coming, that everything I was reading was a lie.

Flynn utilizes the alternating POV chapter technique that she used to near perfection in Dark Places. Odd-numbered chapters are told from Nick’s point of view; the even-numbered ones from Amy’s. In Book 1, which builds the story and interest, Amy’s portion of the story is told through selected diary entries.

The middle, Book 2, was not solid. In fact, it bored me. Now that I’m finished with the book, I find Book 2 unnecessary. More damning, I think it killed the suspense that Book 3 would have carried. Flynn has a tendency to fully explain her reveals. It answered questions before they were asked. At a macro level, I understand why Flynn included it. Much of Gone Girl’s social commentary resides there. It took away from the story she was trying to tell, though. It hurt the novel. Book 2's biggest flaw is that its version of Amy reads false compared to every other version of her that we see (Book 1, Book 2, and testimony of other characters). By the end of that section, Gone Girl was a D+ novel.

In Book 3, Flynn ties everything together into a very good ending. It takes a story and people you know and creates a very realistic hell on earth. It might be the best ending of her three novels. It is definitely the most frightening of her endings.

Gone Girl was uneven. Solid beginning; boring, meandering middle. Gillian Flynn stuck the landing, though, and that saved it.

C