The Winner

The Winner – by David Baldacci

Baldacci is fast becoming an author that, for my tastes, I can describe as “hit or miss”. I really want to enjoy his books. Every time I pick one up, I feel like a parent cheering for someone else’s kid in addition to my own child.  I know that this other child can play well, but I also know they can really stink as well.  This book, for me, falls somewhere in the middle.  It actually had the potential to be great, but there were several things about this story that really sapped a lot of the joy I had when reading a book.

LuAnn Tyler is a poor nineteen year old who has known nothing but poverty and suffering her whole life.  She has a young baby, but really doesn’t want to marry the baby’s father that she lives with in a rusty, beat up trailer.  He’s about as low as you can go in every aspect of life.  Although LuAnn makes many of the same mistakes that young, impoverished kids make, she seems to have a better than average head on her shoulders. At times I thought Baldacci made her act too smart for someone who is supposed to be so stupid.  Or maybe it was too stupid for someone so smart?  Also, she happens to be physically “beautiful”, and the author never forgets to let us know this throughout the pages.  Over and over again.  And again.  And again.

One day, LuAnn is approached by a very strange human being named “Jackson”.  He has an offer for her.  All she has to do is buy a lottery ticket.  He guarantees that whatever ticket she buys, will be the winning ticket.  She can then leave her miserable life behind and take her daughter with her to live the glamorous life of luxury.  Of course, everything comes with a price. Those that follow the lottery winners in real life know that in many instances, life actually becomes much worse for the winner.  In LuAnn’s case, she has to abide by a set of weird rules given to her by Jackson if she elects to go through with the process.  Example: She has to leave the country, and never return.  Not a really big a deal when you have gobs of money and not much of a life to begin with, but still, in a weird way she ends up selling her soul.

The good thing about this book is that Baldacci keeps the whole “lottery” process real.  This isn’t some spooky, supernatural “make a deal with the devil” story that you might find in a Stephen King book. No, it seems that it’s quite feasible to rig the lottery, and we see how it’s done.  Regardless of whether or not such an idea can happen in real life, Baldacci makes it believable, and that’s the author’s job.

So then we come to the parts about this book that fail.  To put it quite simply, our bad guy just reeks of unbelievability.  Now, let me digress and say that I’ve found instances in Baldacci’s books where the author seems to get lazy and uncreative when he’s looking for a way to move his plot forward.  Example: If two characters are trapped within the confinement of a fifteen foot wall outdoors, it’s particularly distressing to then read that one of these characters “discovers” a ladder partially buried beneath the dirt.  What luck!!  Baldacci uses a similar method with his Jackson character in this book.

You see, apparently, Jackson is a “master of disguises”.   Every time we turn around, we meet a new character in this book that somehow crosses paths with LuAnn and company.  We then find out that (-GASP-) it was actually Jackson in another disguise!  You have to be pretty good at disguises when you can fool your own sibling.  I imagine that maybe such things are possible, but when I read stories in real life about actors spending eight hours in a makeup chair to don such a getup (and you can always tell who the actor is anyway, no matter how made up they look), it seems a bit silly when, in this story, Jackson is applying such a trick in the back of a limousine on a fifteen minute ride to the airport.  It just seemed a lazy way to move the story forward.  It was a big letdown.  There were many times when I wanted to throw the book across the room whenever Jackson would “appear” again in a disguise.  The only thing that prevented me from doing such a thing is that I read this on a $199 kindle.  Oh, but how I was tempted.

Had this major flaw been done away with, or modified significantly, I think this would have been a great book. Because of this factor, though, it caused me to have a bit of an unsatisfied feeling. This could have been much better.