Simple Genius

Simple Genius by David Baldacci

I’ve read some really great books by David Baldacci, and I’ve also read some really bad ones.  This one seems to fall right in the middle.  This is one of his “King and Maxwell” novels.  Sean King and Michelle Maxwell are a crime solving duo.  They’re both single, “very good looking”, yet their relationship is purely platonic.  We see that a lot, don’t we?  I didn’t realize it, but the first Baldacci novel I ever read (Hour Game) featured this dynamic duo as well.  I seemed to recall liking that book a lot better.

The main plot involves our heroes’ trying to solve a murder mystery at top secret plant close to our nation’s capitol called Babbage Town, where scientists are trying to come up with advanced “number codes” that will help put a nation’s technology years, if not decades, ahead of anyone else.  There’s also a nearby clandestine CIA facility right across the river to Babbage Town, and one day a code-breaking scientist is found dead on the CIA property.  Well, as you can imagine, there are lot of shady government characters around these events, and when King and Maxwell start poking around, things only get worse.  Had more focus been placed on this Babbage Town place, and what and why the scientists were doing and what they were hoping to accomplish, I think I would have enjoyed this book a lot better.  It seems like this book could have rivaled a Michael Crichton novel in terms of technological complexities.  Sadly, though, Baldacci tends to go into too many different directions, with too many silly characters that tend to only dilute the entire experience.

Example: at the beginning of the book,  we meet the female half of the team, Michelle.  She’s very pissed off for some reason, walks into a bar in the worst part of town, and picks a fight with the biggest guy she can find.  Even though she’s tough enough to beat him up pretty bad, she’s the one that ends up in the hospital.  Why does she do this?  Well, apparently she has “issues with her past” so Sean checks her in to a mental hospital so she can work through her problems.  Let’s just say that had this whole episode been left out (it’s a big, big diversion from the story), the overall book would have fared much better.  Her whole mental hospital excursion almost warrants its own story in an entirely different book (and it really wouldn’t have been a very good one).

Then, there’s this problem in that none of the characters are ever really forced to think particularly hard.  It’s almost as if anytime one of the characters needs something, Baldacci just rubs a literary magic genie to bring his creations exactly what they need, exactly when they need it.  To try to illustrate this, imagine, if you will, two people that are stranded in the Sahara dessert about to die from heat and thirst, and then suddenly, a refrigerator appears in the dunes stocked full of ice cold beverages.  Unbelievable?  Absolutely.  We see a lot of things like that within these pages.  There are far too many times where Baldacci manages to conveniently pull a literary needle out of haystack to help his characters, or dramatically alter the direction of the story.  There was simply too much unbelievability.

Still, I managed to keep turning the pages, and the backgrounds and atmosphere was enough to keep my somewhat entertained.  Still, hoping for a better one next time.