Hour Game

Hour Game (King & Maxwell #2) by David Baldacci

My wife and I read Split Second, the first book of the King & Maxwell series, together. It was the first David Baldacci book either of us had read. After trashing the book, I read other reviews of it. The overall sentiment was that Split Second was bad, but Baldacci’s other books were not; those reviews suggested that my wife and I had started with the wrong Baldacci book. I’d heard this in the past regarding other authors; sometimes the author’s other works proved to be much better than the one I read first, other times, his/her work was consistently as bad as that first book had been. I took into account Baldacci’s success and reputation as well as the “wrong book” viewpoint and decided to give the second King & Maxwell book, Hour Game, a try. Just a few pages in, it became apparent to me that Hour Game had the potential to be just as bad as its predecessor. I kept reading because I wanted to see just how bad it would get. Now that I’ve finished it, I can honestly say that, by a margin not unlike that between The Empire Strikes Back and The Phantom Menace, Split Second was the better of the two.

My review of Split Second contains the following phrases:

--Logistical nightmare

--Demonstrates poor critical thinking skills

--Often, the conclusions are correct—Baldacci thinks they are brilliant, remember—while the leaps that got the investigators there are utterly stupid

--The dumbest thing about the book was that forensics and actual law enforcement tactics have no place within it

All of these things apply to Hour Game, but, amazingly, more so. This second book was longer and its crimes were more complex. This time, King’s magical deductive powers were from farther out in left field and Maxwell’s reduction to literary eye candy more thorough. And still, Baldacci and the concept of maintaining point of view are mortal enemies. I can’t even really tell you about all that or else this review would be about 30 pages long. Instead, I’ll just give a brief overview of the novel’s stupidity.

It all starts in the opening pages when Baldacci rewrites King & Maxwell’s history that he had established in Split Second. He tells us that the events that had led King to leave the Secret Service left him “a very cautious man, unwilling to trust anyone, at least until Michelle Maxwell hurtled into his life.” He then states that Michelle had “taken an instant dislike to the man.” Neither of these statements are true. Did Baldacci remix their history for literary effect like John le Carré had with George Smiley? Did I read an alternative version of the novel? Did he forget what he wrote? Does he think we did?

I vote option #3. What else am I to conclude from an author who uses dental records to identify a murder victim who was shot in the face with a shotgun from a distance of less than two feet? His writing suggests to me that he believes we’re idiots.




****SPOILER****He puts us in the head of his serial killer as he scopes out a potential victim. He describes her as an “attractive woman in her thirties” who drove a bright red Chrysler Sebring convertible with vanity plates that read “DEH JD” and an American Bar Association bumper sticker (really, who puts a bumper sticker on that car?) and wore a nice ankle bracelet. Chapters later, Baldacci tells us that Diane Hinson left her downtown law firm for the evening and “climbed into her late-model Chrysler Sebring.” By this point, we know who she is. Still, he had to tell us. “He went back to the body and carefully unhooked the woman’s anklet, the one he’d admired in the shopping mall parking lot.”****END SPOILER****




The man’s writing demonstrates no concept of logistics. He has one person come home from picking up take-out from a local restaurant in a town he repeatedly notes is tiny and putting it in the microwave. A murder victim was discovered because the police were called after she failed to answer her door and phone while her car was in the garage even though the killer had closed the garage door as he left the premises. In yet another example, King & Maxwell come across the killer in a dark basement with no light sources. The killer still managed to aim his firearm at Maxwell. “The red dot then appeared on her chest and moved up and down her body, seemingly in a teasing manner, as though the person aiming the laser were(sic) fondling her.” This latest one continues a theme of Baldacci’s: the irrelevancy of light.

I sometimes wonder if Baldacci is afraid of women. The way he describes them is so…clinical and delicate. “Her curves and bosom were solidly in the range of eye-catching.” “The door was opened by a young woman wearing a long robe that didn’t entirely hide her heavy curves and inflated bosom.” Who talks like that?

Baldacci has a way of making the most mundane of things seem noteworthy while hand waving the most important events and details of his plot. “Subtle changes in the body upon death were well known to him, and satisfyingly, they were all taking place here.” A novel’s narrative quality is dramatically lessened when an omniscient narrator appears to not know details like this. It makes his writing come across as lazily researched. He details the things he knows about and glosses over those he does not, even when that glossed over piece is the one that is actually critical to the plot.

As was the case in Split Second, the absolute worst thing about Hour Game was the thought investigative thought process.




****SPOILER****King & Maxwell visit the home of Steve Canney to interview his father. The victim’s mother had died in a car accident a few years earlier, so the father is now alone. There were no family photos displayed in the home. The father referred to the deceased by his given name, never as “my son.” From this scant little evidence, they concluded that Roger Canney was not the boy’s actual father, that the boy’s mother had an affair with the richest man in town, and that Roger was well off because he was blackmailing the rich man. King also later concluded that one of the rich man’s sons, believed to be mentally retarded, had actually been born with syphilis and that the STD was the actual cause of his brain injury and the cancer that eventually killed him.****END SPOILER****




David Baldacci does not write crime solving novels. They are, instead, tales of fantasy, unwittingly written Inspector Gadget fan fiction. He demonstrates no knowledge of actual science and technique. Anyone who’s ever used a cell phone knows that the location from which a call was placed or answered can be tracked. Baldacci’s investigators didn’t.

There is too much farcical nonsense in this book to catalogue it all. Surgeries performed by a husband on his wife. Previously bound hostages whose hands and feet were unbound before they were thrown into a locked room. An escape from jail using tools extracted from a fake vein in a man’s arm. Drug deals in which the purchaser drove away in an antique car. Even the attempts on King & Maxwell’s lives were ludicrous.

The coup de grâce, the scene that made reading Hour Game worth the time I spent, was the most ridiculous scene I’ve ever read. On a dark and stormy night, Michelle and the killer tracked each other looking for a kill shot.

One lightning flash; that was all she needed. She edged around the bush, backtracked a bit and then slowly made her way down and around with the goal of coming up behind Eddie.

The flash of lightning. She heard the noise to her right. She pivoted and fired in the same instant. There was an explosion in front of her as a spark of red-hot light erupted for an instant and then vanished.

She couldn’t know it, but Eddie had at the same time been circling around her and had fired at the exact same instant as she. Beating odds of probably a billion to one, the two bullets had collided, causing the explosive spark she’d seen.

Yeah, he really wrote that. Colliding bullets was the high point of his climactic scene. Really, that’s all you need to know. Hour Game was craptastic. I’ll try reading something good next time.

F