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catevari 's review for:
Split Second
by David Baldacci
Sometimes you stay up late with a book because it's just that great and you can't bear to put it down; other times, you find yourself up late because you just want this PoS book out of your life as soon as possible.
Like a lot of people right now, I picked up Split Second because it's recently been made into a TV show and I was interested in checking out the source material. Usually the visual media conversion of a book comes off the poorer in any comparison, but after having read the book, I have to say that every change the production company has made has come off as genius in comparison to the poorly written, illogical mess that is Split Second.
It's one of those books that's not just bad, it's boring. I want to call the prose workmanlike, but honestly, I've read a lot of myster-thrillers, it's a genre that generally lends itself to fairly functional storytelling and the prose in Split Second was clunkier and less inspired than its peers. The characters were flat, uninteresting and felt a bit too much like Baldacci's wish-fulfillment.
Related to this, I hated how he wrote Maxwell and the other major female character, Joan Dillinger, both separately and together.The relationship between King and Dillinger at least relates back to the plot, but Maxwell's instant fascination with King, her immediate deference and trust, her weird, out-of-place jealousy about Dillinger and the stupid, ugly catfighting between Dillinger and Maxwell over King was predictable, tedious and made me feel like I was an unwilling voyeur into Baldacci's id.
The plot, such as it was, was just painful to get through. Some of this is a style issue. On the one hand, Baldacci gives out information—and really obvious information at that—and then spends the next dozen pages having the characters verbally rehash what just happened. On the other hand, he plays annoyingly coy with any/all the information that would actually let the reader put the pieces together in a way that I more commonly associate with YA, where the author tells you that the character(s) has found or concluded something, but doesn't bother to tell you what it is. I, personally, don't like those types of mysteries; it always feels as though the author isn't playing fair with the reader and that the story (and/or storyteller) isn't good enough to play fair.
The other part of the problem is just that the plot is freaking ridiculous.A spurned and obsessed auteur manipulates events and politics and people just to try and make his former lady-love/muse (who is also dead before the book even begins) come back to him through absurdly elaborate plots involving dozens, if not hundreds of people, over a period of decades? There is not enough eyeroll in the world for how dumb this story was.
The execution was equally poor. There are all the aforementioned problems, obviously. In one of my status updates, I commented, "This guy never met a scene he wouldn't rather tell than show." (This is especially absurd in a scene where Baldacci narrates only Sean King's half of a phone conversation, even though Sean is the POV character) The forensic and procedural elements read like someone who's never even watched a cop show, let alone done their research.
Bottom line: this was a terrible book that didn't even have the benefit of being interestingly bad. If I hadn't agreed to read it with my husband (and if he hadn't suffered through finishing it ahead of me) I would've never finished it. I certainly didn't enjoy it.
Like a lot of people right now, I picked up Split Second because it's recently been made into a TV show and I was interested in checking out the source material. Usually the visual media conversion of a book comes off the poorer in any comparison, but after having read the book, I have to say that every change the production company has made has come off as genius in comparison to the poorly written, illogical mess that is Split Second.
It's one of those books that's not just bad, it's boring. I want to call the prose workmanlike, but honestly, I've read a lot of myster-thrillers, it's a genre that generally lends itself to fairly functional storytelling and the prose in Split Second was clunkier and less inspired than its peers. The characters were flat, uninteresting and felt a bit too much like Baldacci's wish-fulfillment.
Related to this, I hated how he wrote Maxwell and the other major female character, Joan Dillinger, both separately and together.
The plot, such as it was, was just painful to get through. Some of this is a style issue. On the one hand, Baldacci gives out information—and really obvious information at that—and then spends the next dozen pages having the characters verbally rehash what just happened. On the other hand, he plays annoyingly coy with any/all the information that would actually let the reader put the pieces together in a way that I more commonly associate with YA, where the author tells you that the character(s) has found or concluded something, but doesn't bother to tell you what it is. I, personally, don't like those types of mysteries; it always feels as though the author isn't playing fair with the reader and that the story (and/or storyteller) isn't good enough to play fair.
The other part of the problem is just that the plot is freaking ridiculous.
The execution was equally poor. There are all the aforementioned problems, obviously. In one of my status updates, I commented, "This guy never met a scene he wouldn't rather tell than show." (This is especially absurd in a scene where Baldacci narrates only Sean King's half of a phone conversation, even though Sean is the POV character) The forensic and procedural elements read like someone who's never even watched a cop show, let alone done their research.
Bottom line: this was a terrible book that didn't even have the benefit of being interestingly bad. If I hadn't agreed to read it with my husband (and if he hadn't suffered through finishing it ahead of me) I would've never finished it. I certainly didn't enjoy it.