Customer Reviews

First Daughter (Center Point Platinum Mystery (Large Print))

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

This story had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it was never realized.

Although the author could have made this a great novel, he failed to deliver. Instead of focusing on the main plot, Van Lustbader pursued an agenda of anti-religious bigotry. Much of the action is implausible. Some of these are not just the run of the mill farfetched events in a novel, they are too over the top to have any credibility. The editing is also substandard.

The main idea of the story is that ATF agent Jack McClure is recruited by the president-elect to find his recently kidnapped daughter. The McClure character could have been a great one, but was not well developed. Also, the author tried to turn McClure's dyslexia into some sort of mystical super gift that gives him the ability to 'see' things that no one else can in multiple dimensions. This silly plot device was never expanded to the point that it would make any sense.

Mr. Van Lustbader did his best to portray any people of faith as moronic and phony. One example is this: 'But Father Larrigan wasn't full of grace, nor was any priest.' This is just one example of many.

The errors included ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) listed as AFT in at least two places.

There are a lot better action novels out there. I'd suggest anything by Brad Thor, Vince Flynn, or many others before this. I'd recommend skipping this one.

The opening pages have all the indications of a great mass market thriller -- the the President-elect's daughter is about to make a terrorist attack at the inauguration. Just as she's about to open a vial of anthrax, the book flashes back two months to her kidnapping and the selection of Jack McClure, an ATF with dyslexia, to rescue her. Cool.

The book quickly falls flat though, a victim of stilted dialogue, inaccuracies of forensic science, a complete lack of understanding about the ways that DHS, the White House, and the Secret Service work, and a completely weird and unbelievable plot about a war between religious fundamentalists and secular reformer/protest/terroists....something or the other. Frankly, the sections of the book that discuss relgion and secularism are babbling nonsense.

This book should never have made it past the first level of editing, much less the final publishing process. In my experience, if I enjoy a book by an author, I can find something new by looking for other books by the same publisher -- good editors make great authors. I won't be buying anything from Forge Publishing any time soon.

There were many things I liked about this book and quite a few that I disliked. It took me about 100 pages to really get interested in the plot and characters (the book is about 400 pages total), but after that I was more or less hooked. I particularly liked the development of the main character, Jack McClure, and wondered if the description of his dyslexia as a type of disability accompanied by extreme giftedness is accurate or rare. I just finished the book tonight, so I'm looking forward to researching that.

For me, Jack's backstory was even more interesting that the main plot. I thought the author did an excellent job of creating a sympathetic character with texture and depth and really liked the Gus character as well. The rest of the characters weren't nearly as well developed, and some were merely caricatures.

This leads right into what I liked least about the story. The debate over whether or not organized religion is a good thing or bad thing began early in the book and continued through to the end. While the outgoing U.S. President was presented early on as a stark raving mad religious zealot, there were also evil characters on the godless side. It appeared for at least half of the book that the author was trying to portray both arguments from a somewhat neutral position. This changed in the latter part of the book, however, to relentless diatribes about the evils of religion and the idiocy of those that choose to believe in God and any form of afterlife. I felt I was being preached at during many parts in the second half, and that's just annoying.

Instead of being a suspense novel with some bits thrown in about religion, this almost felt like an editorial about what's wrong with religion and why we should all be atheists encased in popular fiction to make it more palatable. Based on that and my opinion that the actual writing was pretty good but not great, I just can't recommend this book and don't plan to read other books by this author.

Eric Van Lustbader's FIRST DAUGHTER is a page-turner that hurtles through the storyline and gives readers a hero to root for as soon as he steps onto the scene. It even gets away with one of the plot gimmicks I usually most despise. The novel starts out at the inaugural ceremony for the newly elected President of the United States, introduces an element of duplicity and treachery on part of the First Daughter, then flips back in time a month to when events leading up to this showdown began.

I persevered in spite of myself and sank immediately into the story. Lustbader is a good storyteller - not always a structurally sound novelist - but always succeeds in grabbing people's attention. He was a natural choice to continue the Jason Bourne books, the third of which was recently released.

I don't know if the author intends Jack McClure to become a series character or not, but Jack has enough depth and problems that I want to see him again. Since I have ADHD with some mild OCD, and have children that have those as well, I was even more fascinated by Jack's dyslexia and the fact that his brain processed information faster than a normal person was able to. Jack's inability to read pertinent information at times was something I clearly understood. I get easily frustrated with instruction pamphlets and often have to hand them off to my wife.

Jack has also recently lost his daughter in a tragic car wreck, and - subsequently - his marriage because he wasn't able to get past his guilt of not being there for his daughter. He works for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, but President-Elect Edward Carson calls Jack in when his 19-year-old daughter Alli gets kidnapped. The personal tie exists between the two men because Emma, Jack's daughter, was Alli's roommate at college.

Immediately, Jack takes up the trail. The resonance between not being their for his own daughter and getting the chance to save another young girl comes home at once. Unfortunately, Jack also steps afoul of the Secret Service and other government agencies seeking the kidnapper.

This inter-agency rivalry screams plot manipulation on part of the author, but I liked the way it was handled. The rivalry became a stumbling block and something that had to be dealt with, but it wasn't the largest part of the story.

One of the things that took me out of the book - at first - was Lustbader's insistence on telling Jack's backstory. I was confused and irritated when I turned to the first chapter that showed Jack as a kid getting abused by his father. I didn't know what that had to do with the plot. And, in truth, it didn't have that much to do with everything, in my opinion, despite the fact that Jack and the killer had a history together.

However, I soon found myself looking forward to those chapters involving Jack's past. The character ended up getting a lot more depth that way, and I bought into him more heavily than I would have than if I'd read the kidnapping/murder plot only. Admittedly, some of what Jack experienced was over the top, because I really don't think a man like Gus would take an interest in the boy that Jack was. But it's good fiction.

While working on the kidnapping, Jack gets a chance to understand what happened to Emma as well. All of those things are eventually tied together, and it makes the machinations on part of the villain even more evil. I enjoyed the fact that the record got set straight, and it made Jack's loss more poignant, but it came so fast at the end that my attention was divided between that and what was going on at the time with Alli.

The religious references bugged me too. I still don't quite understand why they were in the book as much. And I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about the presentation. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to feel threatened by rising conservative Christianity or if I'm just supposed to be made aware that it's out there. There were sections of the novel that grated and slowed down due to the diatribes that went on.

Overall, though, readers wanting a suspenseful tale well told will enjoy FIRST DAUGHTER. It's a blistering quick read with a hero that will become real to you.

What a disappointment. This book held out so much promise. An assination attempt at the inauguration, carried out by one of the "first daughters".

Here are a few reasons I actively disliked it.

1. The circumstances were implausible. An ATF agent was assigned to be a major player in an investigation that would be handled by the FBI and possibly assisted by the secret service. (If my memory serves, after the Kennedy assination, congress gave the FBI exclusive jurisdiction over head-of-government-branch assinations. This was to prevent the fed vs local squabbles that led to Ruby's killing of Oswald and so many conspiracy theories.)

2. The racist, religous ranting. I understand that it was important to show the soon-to-be-ex president as someone who was hanging on to power with the fervor of a zealot, but the long diatribes were boring and pointless and, even worse, offensive.

3. The insistence that dyslexia is a handicap that causes embarrassment, needs to be kept secret, yet endows the people with it with special powers to observe things in rooms that othes did not notice. This is simply wrong on so many levels!

Skip this one.

Page 15. That's when I knew I was in trouble. The opener to Lustbader's book, FIRST DAUGHTER, has the title character being whisked to her father's inauguration. As she stands on the dais with her family, she reaches into her pocket and lifts out a "vial of specially prepared anthrax."

"And like the contents of Pandora's box, out would come death in amber waves of grain."

I find myself struggling to explain why this line so perfectly encapsulates what's wrong with this book's prose. It wavers between insightful and just plain senseless, and in both cases it is a caustic color of purple. Our author is obviously an intelligent and well-spoken man, but even his best passages are over-flourished and his metaphors are schmaltzy and bizarre ("The early morning was waxy as a spit-polished shoe" is one of my favorites).

This ties in perfectly with the book's largest theme, which is one of Religion vs. Reason. Most of the other reviews I've read oversimplify Lustbader's central point. He's not necessarily complaining about religion, just about its zealots. The outgoing president of the novel is one of those hypocritical idealogues that are ga-ga about God, someone who will break nine of the commandments just to make sure that you don't break the tenth one. And on the other side is a specious organization named E-Two, an off-shoot of the First American Secular Revivalists (lets call them Motivated Atheists). In between the two we find Alli Carson, the kidnapped daughter of president-elect Edward Carson.

So the book takes every opportunity it can (every single one) to wax philosophical on faith, hope, the spirit, the soul, and belief. It's obvious that Lustbader believes in a world beyond our ken (the book is filled with obtrusive "miracles" that are left vague enough to be debatable), but his quasi-pantheism is mostly a distraction from the needlessly complex "intrigue" of the novel. We have double-double agents, a corrupt NSA official, a rogue hitman with his own agenda, and an ATF agent with dyslexia.

Yes. That's Jack McClure, whiz-kid at hunting down criminals, but not so great when it comes to reading road signs or getting along with his estranged wife, Sharon. The novel tries to tie Jack's abusive childhood with the current goings-on, but the connections aren't exactly believable or even rewarding. Likewise, his dyslexia is referenced many, many times as a source of both shame and power. Apparantly having dyslexia gives you the ability to make three dimensional decisions in a matter of seconds (Air Force pilots take note!). It's basically a plot contrivance, and one that -- like the religious posturing -- becomes something of a nuisance.

When the story focuses on what it really should be -- a police procedural -- it's not half bad. But the book wants to make several deep and potent points about life and love. That, combined with some of the worst dialogue I've ever read in my life, denudes the espionage of any tension it might have supplied. What you're left with is a messy diatribe against fundamentalism and a bunch of gibberish comparing the church to a brain-washing assassin.

Okay. And some unintentionally funny metaphors.

What can I say...I like at least a touch of subtlety in a book. This one has none past the opening chapter, which was promising. I felt like I was being beaten over the head with the author's 'messages' to the point that I couldn't relax and enjoy the plot. I can excuse some amount of preaching, but please do it as a subsidiary of the story instead of screaming it out on every page.

The heavy-handed approach was applied to the characters as well. The bad guys are raving, bug-eyed stereotypes that are insulting, and even worse, boring. The good guys are average, but brilliant, people bravely and honorably struggling against the odds stacked against them. Sure, he tries to give the good guys some character flaws, but that also felt contrived.

There's probably a good book in here somewhere, buried under the clumsy approach. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief this time. Lustbader can, and has, done much better.

It is very rare when I find I can't finish a book. This is one of those times. Maybe the second half is better than the first, but somehow I doubt it.

The premise is interesting if not improbable. It starts out with an apparent terrorist attack on a Presidential inauguration led by the new President's Daughter. Then it cuts away to her kidnapping a month earlier from a tony women's college. Her Secret Service agent is really in the BATF which is odd and his dead daughter was her roommate.

In the middle of it all is a whole bunch of strange Presidential religion led by the old President who is clearly deranged and to all appearances wants to stay in office.

This might work if it were not so preachy and the characters so unlikeable.

Take a pass on this one.

I picked up this paperback because normally I like political stories. I was unfamiliar with the author though of course I know some of his work has been made into movies. In addition, the rave reviews by many fine authors snowed me. Normally, I ignore those as authors are sometimes pressured to give good reviews of other authors. Whoa!!!! I should have followed my instincts. This book did not 'grab me' until page 240 something and even then I had trouble concentrating. I finished it out of curiosity. The author's grandiose prose I found ridiculous. There were many examples, but in the final pages he wrote:''A bitter front out of the Midwest had nailed shut the coffin of the January thaw!" Whew. Also, particularly annoying was that no one walked but rather 'padded' from here to there!!!!! I know padded is usually used for barefoot people going from bed to kitchen and I'm not fond of it however, here it was so silly.

Avoid this one!!!!!!!

Having read a couple of the Bourne books from Eric van Lustbader, I decided to taka a chance on First Daughter. Looking back at this book, I am still trying to figure out if it was time well spent. Lustbader's storyline of the abduction of the president-elects daughter a month before the inauguration had great promise, that unfortunately went largely unfulfilled in the end. On the plus side, the action and plot twists kept the reader turning the pages. The character development of the leading character, Jack McClure, was solid, especially the tie-ins to historical events that drive present-day issues. On the down side, all of the good is nearly lost amongst the overbearing religious messages - both pro- and anti-religion. In my opinion, the book would have been far better without the religious issues being so much to the forefront.