True Blue

True Blue by David Baldacci

Mr. Baldacci owes his fans an apology.  I say that not because this book is awful (which it is), but because I simply refuse to believe that he actually wrote this book.  I always get a bit suspicious when an author seems to release two or three books per year.  O.K., I suppose it is possible, but one wonders if someone else actually penned this thing, with Baldacci simply looking over their shoulder for about five minutes per week to ensure that there’s some sort of coherence.

If you've read Baldacci, you know his schtick.  His books seem to always take place in Washington D.C., and there’s some sort of murder, kidnapping, assassination, and/or terrorist attack that has taken place or will take place.  We usually uncover that, tangled up in this web, are usually some high profile types (even the President himself) that are pulling the strings behind these catastrophes.  Such is the case here as well, and it’s not the actual story that is bad, it’s the idiotic, under developed characters that we’re forced to believe have any resemblance to actual people.

Our hero here is a female cop named Mace.  Mace is one of those cops who doesn’t “follow the rules”.  She’s actually an ex-cop because, as our story begins, she’s being released from prison after serving her time for a crime that she, apparently, didn’t commit.  Fortunately for Mace, her sister is the Chief of Police in Washington D.C.  So Mace, eager to regain her reputation, sets out to prove she’s innocent and was set up.  Now, normally I don’t post spoilers when I post reviews, but this book was so bad, that I really don’t care if I break protocol:  Mace never meets her objective.  The story simply takes an abrupt turn somewhere within these pages, and we get sidetracked into another story that really doesn’t have anything to do what Mace originally set out to do.

Instead, there’s a mysterious murder that happens at a law firm, Mace tags along with her sister to the crime scene, and starts an investigation on her own since she’s no longer a cop.  So Mace teams up with one of the lawyers at the firm who knew the victim, and manages to break a library full of rules since she’s violating her parole and isn’t supposed to be conducting any kind of investigation.  Of course, her sister reprimands her with the obvious threats of “sending her back to prison” over and over, but ol’ Mace simply doesn’t care.  It seems her life is now a “prison anyway” since she can’t be a cop anymore.  Yeah.  Right.  Whatever.

So we read about Mace racing through the badlands of Washington D.C. on her Ducati (an Italian motorcycle, I think) while wearing high heals and getting herself in trouble, yet managing to weasel her way out of situations in the most unbelievable ways possible.  In one instance, she encounters a thug in a rough part of town while she’s with her lawyer friend, and manages to avoid a violent death by having her friend challenge the thug to a basketball game.  If her friend wins the game, they get to have their lives spared.

I swear I didn’t make that up.

We’re then introduced to so many ridiculous characters that have absolutely nothing to do with the story (neither the original tale, nor the one we’re detoured towards).  If they do have something to do with the story, the people are so one-dimensional, that you actually can feel your stomach turning as you’re trying to turn the pages.  We meet the prosecutor that sent Mace to prison, who doesn’t have one ounce of kindness in her.  She reminded me of Cruella De Ville from that Disney movie.  Such characters work in cartoon fantasies, but they sure as heck don’t work in any attempt at serious literature.  We could say the same about the encounter with her estranged mother.  We also read far too much about Mace’s new job as a social worker.  Nothing within these situations matters a lick in terms of where the book is supposed to be going.

Reading this book reminded me of those times when you’re fighting to stay awake late at night to finish a particularly dull movie.  You don’t really want to stay up, but you keep shaking your head because you’ve figured that you’ve made it far enough in the movie to where it becomes a challenge to just get through the stupid thing.  When you wake up exhausted the next day, you curse yourself for wasting your time on such an idiotic movie.  This was what reading the last 100 pages or so of this book felt like.  I think I managed to finish the last 100 pages in about 10 minutes, since I couldn’t make myself read every awful word on every awful page.

What’s really scary, is that Baldacci could bring back these unpleasant people in future books.  There is still too many unanswered questions about Mace and company, but it simply isn’t worth it to bring these characters back to life.  Let’s hope Baldacci retires these idiots and sticks to King and Maxwell and The Camel Club.   Please.