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A review by book_concierge
The Christmas Train by David Baldacci
2.0
Book on CD read by Tim Matheson
2.5**
Former war correspondent turned magazine features writer Tom Langdon is taking the train from Washington DC to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with his girlfriend. He’s also researching an article on modern-day train travel. Having in mind the spacious compartments of classic movies, he’s in for a rude awakening, but he certainly finds plenty of interesting characters to profile, including a young couple planning to wed on the train, a big-name movie producer, a Bohemian fortune teller, a retired priest, and a woman who is such a frequent passenger everyone knows her. There is also a thief aboard.
I’d never read anything by Baldacci before and somehow thought of him as a writer of “legal thrillers” so I was surprised to find this holiday romance with a little bit of mystery involved. I was quickly drawn into the story. I loved Regina and Roxanne, the two women Amtrak employees who showed such an interest in their passengers, though I thought several of the other characters were little more than caricatures. I had figured out who the thief was fairly early and this part of the story seemed really incidental to the central romance, so I’m not sure why Baldacci even included it. For the genre, it was fairly entertaining, but the resolution of the central conflict was just too over the top for me. The novel lost a half star with that.
Tim Mathewson does a fine job performing the audio book. He is a gifted voice artist and had many different voices for the big cast of characters. The audio also includes sound effects of train whistles and the clackity clack of rail cars over the rails, as well as some seasonal music. Usually this kind of embellishment irritates me, but it really added to the atmosphere of this story.
2.5**
Former war correspondent turned magazine features writer Tom Langdon is taking the train from Washington DC to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with his girlfriend. He’s also researching an article on modern-day train travel. Having in mind the spacious compartments of classic movies, he’s in for a rude awakening, but he certainly finds plenty of interesting characters to profile, including a young couple planning to wed on the train, a big-name movie producer, a Bohemian fortune teller, a retired priest, and a woman who is such a frequent passenger everyone knows her. There is also a thief aboard.
I’d never read anything by Baldacci before and somehow thought of him as a writer of “legal thrillers” so I was surprised to find this holiday romance with a little bit of mystery involved. I was quickly drawn into the story. I loved Regina and Roxanne, the two women Amtrak employees who showed such an interest in their passengers, though I thought several of the other characters were little more than caricatures. I had figured out who the thief was fairly early and this part of the story seemed really incidental to the central romance, so I’m not sure why Baldacci even included it. For the genre, it was fairly entertaining, but the resolution of the central conflict was just too over the top for me. The novel lost a half star with that.
Tim Mathewson does a fine job performing the audio book. He is a gifted voice artist and had many different voices for the big cast of characters. The audio also includes sound effects of train whistles and the clackity clack of rail cars over the rails, as well as some seasonal music. Usually this kind of embellishment irritates me, but it really added to the atmosphere of this story.