One of my favorite movies of the nineties was a lightweight comedy starring the Governator as a superspy married to an unwitting hausfrau, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. Spoofing the heck out of the James Bond spy thrillers, "True Lies" was plotted around Swartzenegger's bulk and near superhuman powers. It was funny. Speaking of "truth," David Baldacci's latest thriller, The Whole Truth, likewise stars a Terminator-sized protagonist. He's a gigantic, handsome hunk (to channel the late Madeline Kahn, "Vat a schwanstuker he must have!") with electric blue eyes, a "fixer" who spends his days jetting around the world interrupting the best-laid plans of bad guys. Unfortunately, the book's not funny...
It's Shaw: just Shaw. He's a killing machine, a black ops agent for a super-secret agency who's suddenly learned that he's human after all: you have to be human to fall in love, right? His Anna's yin to his yang, brains to his brawn, blonde and beautiful to his dark and handsome. The lovebirds are a match made in heaven.
Problem being that heaven is a mess: the billionaire arms merchant (the legal kind; a defense contractor) Nicholas Creel has decided it is time for an investment in his future. Seeing as he makes more money when big countries are at each others' throats than he does when the bad guys are just a ragtag band of religious fanatics, he's taken matters into his own hands. His plot is destined to take the world to the brink of another Cold War, which is exactly where he wants it. And no one can possibly stand in his way... unless maybe it's Shaw; Shaw and Katie James, a gorgeous blonde reporter he picks up somewhere along the way.
With trillions at stake and Creel's "perception management" campaign screaming along in high gear, Shaw and Katie might as well be mere speed bumps in the road - but Shaw makes one helluva big speed bump...
In his first thriller set abroad, thriller-writer David Baldacci proves that setting makes little difference to his thrill-a-minute style. Whether he's writing about the Clint Eastwood-inspired "Oliver Stone" and his Camel Club buddies or flinging a pair of ex-Secret Service agents at each other to see whether the parts fit (they do), Baldacci cranks out the thrills. You can almost forget that he deals only in broad generalizations about society and larger-than-life characters. In the case of Shaw, it's definitely "larger-than-life": the guy's a giant.
Given a plot that rehashes, for the nty-nth time, the evil of which the superrich seem so perfectly capable; and given a protagonist who's little more than a super-sized James Bond, it's obvious that Baldacci is pandering to the least common denominator in the world of thriller readers. Not that we're a particularly discerning bunch... What the heck, he probably wrote The Whole Truth while visualizing Vin Diesel as Shaw and Cameron Diaz in a serious role as Katie. Or perhaps Cate Blanchett...
While Baldacci struggles to provide his characters some semblance of humanity with such emotional moments as this:
"[Frank] finally whispered, 'I can't take this anymore. I'm no good with the emotional stuff, Katie. Give me a nine-millimeter Glock stuffed down my throat over this crap any day.' He turned and left, but not before Katie thought she heard a tiny sob escape his lips."
there's really very little to them, other than the "Pow!" "Crash!" and the rest of the cartoon balloons that seem to eternally hover over their heads. Combine the major stereotyping of characters with a thin plot that's already been written a couple dozen times, and there's just not much here to enjoy. It kind of makes you wonder: will anyone ever write a thriller novel starring a dumpy little man who never gets laid?
Parting shots: although perfectly willing to suspend my disbelief for a good cause, I have a tough time overlooking the idea that kidnappers looking for a tracking device would only do a visual search. With trillions of dollars (maybe even euros!) at stake, you'd think they could have found themselves an electronic sniffer...