This is my first David Baldacci book, and most likely my last. It was a free pick-up, something to read while I was on vacation.

The book is awful. It’s so bad it may be the most humorous novel I’ve read this year. It’s like a parody of a someone writing a bestselling novel. Someone at Mr. Baldacci’s publisher needs to hire a first rate copy editor, because obviously, there is not one on the staff, This book is filled with sentences and paragraphs so incoherent it would have put my high school Advance Composition teacher, Mrs. Mazursky, into a grammatical meltdown. By page two I was re-writing sentences in my head in order to clarify the author’s thoughts.

Books like this (MASSIVE bestsellers) always make me shake my head in wonderment of how bad publishing has become. (I will refrain from commenting on people who find books like this “brilliant and entertaining” – but I guess that explains James Patterson.)

This book is pretty much beyond saving – it’s a untidy mess of murder, murder, murder, solved by a couple of former federal agents who are NO Mulder and Scully, more Dumb & Dumber. Their “clever” repartee sounds like bad Disney Channel sit-com dialogue. The story is so convoluted – sex, STDs, strip clubs, serial killers, old Southern money, blackmail, more serial killers, stalkers, serial killers – that it makes no sense.

AVOID!

 1781 – British Occupation.

At 5:00 p.m. Col. Issac Hayne “was escorted by a party of soldiers to a gallows erected within the lines of the town with his hands tied behind, and there hung up till he was dead.” David Ramsay reported:

The military escort consisted of three hundred men. The place of execution was just without the city-lines, near Radcliffe’s Garden, nearly in front, and within a stone’s throw of the present Orphan House building. The troops formed a hollow square around the scaffold, the British troops occupying the front and rear, the Hessians on the right and left.

During the march through the city “the streets were crowded with thousands of anxious spectators.” Someone in the crowd called to Hayne “Exhibit the example of how an American can die!” Hayne replied, “I will endeavor to do so.”

Issac Hayne marched from the Exchange Building to his execution.