text: I have read Baldacci's first four novels and have immensely enjoyed all of them.  This one, however, is just awful.  Not only the character's dialogue but even the story itself is written like a really bad detective movie.  The only thing I can think of to compare it to is this :  There was a series of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons where Calvin imagines himself as a private detective and they are written like the old detective shows, with lame lines like "The gun was loaded, and so was I".  That is exactly what this book is like, except it goes on for 400 pages.  There isn't a single interesting character in this book, in my opinion.  You just have to slog your way through the book to get to the end.  It's the Bataan Death March of novels.  I hope this is an aberration - I'll certainly give him another try since the first four novels that I read were so good.  But one more stinker like this one and I'll drop his name from my reading list
  