Customer Reviews

Total Control

5 star:		(70)
4 star:		(47)
3 star:		(29)
2 star:		(22)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

My first introduction to David Baldacci was back in 1996 when People Magazine picked his first book, Absolute Power, as the "Page Turner of the Week". I thought the premise of that book was phenomenal and I became an immediate fan. For some reason, I skipped over Total Control and went on to read his third and fourth books, The Winner and The Simple Truth. Both were good reads but nothing compared to Absolute Power. I'm glad I went back and read Total Control because it's in true Baldacci form in my opinion.

In this offering, Baldacci takes the typical American family, Sidney and Jason Archer and their little daughter Amy, and pits them against corporate greed at its worst. Sidney (the wife with a man's name) is a corporate attorney. Jason, the husband, is an executive with a technology company. Since Sidney is working on a deal that will merge her husband's company with another major technology firm, she is privy to many things that could lead to trouble. Jason, on the other hand, is struggling to make more money so that his wife can become a stay-at-home mom to their daughter. While this concept is characteristic of many American families, sometimes this drive can lead to a downward spiral of events from which there is no return. When Jason disappears, it is up to Sidney to try to clear his name while trying to save her own job at the same time. This book is replete with all the scenarios that followers of the thriller genre have come to expect. There's a plane crash, a car chase, espionage, kidnapping, phone-tapping and the usual sinister characters you find in most of Baldacci's books.

I read most of this book on the plane traveling from Minnesota to Philadelphia. It never seems to fail that when I'm flying, I'm usually reading a book that involves a plane crash. The good thing about this book is that it is so fast-paced that I arrived at my destination without even realizing I had been in the air over three hours. If you're looking for something that is suspenseful and believable, I think you'd enjoy this one. I'd like to add that as I looked around to see what other people on the plane were reading, I was not surprised to see other readers with Baldacci titles in their hands. I guess he's come a long way since that first book back in 1996. Kudos to you David Baldacci for your well-deserved success.

I am recommending this book to all my friends who love a real heart-pounding thriller. I refused to put this book down until I finished it...Total Control has all the verve and excitement of Absolute Power but is infinitely more intriguing. The high-tech aspect of this novel was well researched. I love Baldaccis treatment of his women characters: in Sidney Archer he has created a smart, determined and savvy tigress who exhibits extraordinary resolve and courage in her quest to find out about her husbands surprising death. She is as adept at dealing with hired hit men as she is with slick corporate lawyers. The plot itself is a rather convoluted maze with enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing about the next plot line: chapter by chapter. This is pure David Baldacci. There is no filler here. If you want to read an exciting novel that holds your interest with each page this is it.

Total Control begins with two high-tech companies, both in need of technological infusion, pursuing a smaller firm whose advanced technology will guarantee future success. The potential for conflict is immediately evident as the same high-powered law firm is representing both companies in their bids. Attractive corporate attorney Sidney Archer is handling the affairs for one company, but it just so happens that her husband Jason is the main person collecting records pertinent to the sale for the same company.

Matters quickly fall apart when in the midst of a high level meeting involving all the principals of the deal, Sidney discovers that her husband has supposedly met his death in a plane crash, after having told his superiors that he would be home doing odds and ends. Suspicions multiply when the loss of millions from corporate accounts is discovered, not to mention the death of a high-level banking official on the same flight.

The story kicks into high gear when crusty FBI agent Lee Sawyer tries to make sense of it all. Of course, what would a story set in the cut-throat world of corporate high-tech be without the obnoxious, ruthless CEO; the brilliant, but slighted, guru; and lots of corporate security involving former CIA and FBI agents. Sidney is desperate to discover the truth about her husband. She finds herself somewhat clumsily navigating through building security systems, surveillance, phone taps, cryptic E-mails, computer security, and strange phone calls. It becomes evident that more than a Bonnie-and-Clyde caper is underway, and the bad guys have vast resources and are playing for keeps.

The book is entertaining but not without some problems. For this reader the writing seemed stilted or awkward - it didn't flow too well. There were these constantly introduced little twists like "Sidney did not see the man lurking across the street." It feels like reader manipulation. Some of the high-tech seemed either fanciful or was made to seem more difficult than it is. It is understandable that a shrewd attorney would have the wherewithal to pursue the mysterious death of her husband, but the slippage of her role into one of wonder woman, physically confronting truly bad guys, was not convincing. FBI agent Sawyer was probably the most compelling character. For such a lengthy book, the ending takes far too predictable of a turn, but it also manages to be incomplete, as the reader will see.

There seems to be a lot of love it or hate it reviews. Yes the book was too long, a bit unrealistic, and somewhat predictable. But it compares favorably to most books of this genre. There are not many Le Carre's or Clancy's out there. It was an acceptable read. I'm not dissuaded from trying another one of his.

Set against an advanced technological backdrop the story quickly unfolds to let the reader know that the real control belongs to those with the most money. So much money they can control people in positions of power like puppets on a string. Greed is the focal point of total control. There are those who will do anything because of it, which ulitmately leads to their demise. Contrasting these, are the "innocent" ones caught in a web of intrigue trying to put the many pieces of the puzzle together(this is a recurring theme found in The Winner, while not as dark a plot as Total Control, it is a suspenseful novel not to be missed) As one person said in Total Control (Sawyer, I think) "Money is the root of all evil, or rather the lack of it." This story leads us into the innermost recesses of the characters minds where we can see the motivation behind their actions, actions which lead to a downward spiral or soaring success. At times Total Control is touching and tragic, but always chilling and gripping. Read Total Control, it is a fast paced cleverly written story, one you won't soon forget.

Interesting idea, but oddly written. I'm not talking grammar and syntax, like some other reviewers. I refer to the over-the-top style. Everything is a crisis!!! On every page characters are wincing or gimacing, their throats are constricting, they cannot breathe. I spent a lot of my time rolling my eyes. Why didn't I just put it down? Good question- it is just compelling enough to keep turning those pages.

I enjoyed this book. Despite other reviewers' concerns about a lack of realism and poor characters, I thought the plot and characters were engaging and worth spending time with. There were points when too many story threads with lots of detail overlapped, but Sidney was a gutsy female protagonist who carried me through to the next moment of clarity. It was worth finishing, and I would recommend it as a vacation read, although it's not as polished as many other fictional thrillers.

The main female character in Total Control, Sidney, is a senior partner in a major law firm but spends most of the book acting like a 14 year old. If another partner speaks to her in a way she doesn't like, she gives them a cold look and doesn't "grace them" with a response. Sidney would have trouble holding down a job as a receptionist, much less a senior partner. If Baldacci had made her smack her gum a few more times, she could easily have gone undercover in a junior high school.

Baldacci has Inspector Clousseau's eye for detail. In one early scene on page 85, two characters meet at the site of an airplane crash, and Baldacci sets a new record for cramming the most inconsistencies into a single paragraph. Baldacci describes the daylight as "rapidly failing," but Lee Sawyer shows up wearing sunglasses, perhaps because in Baldacci's junior-high world on-duty cops are required to wear sunglasses at all times. George Kaplan "freezes" when he sees Sawyer then squints to try to make out who that person is a "bare five feet away." I can usually identify people from 5 feet away, but then again, I don't squint to see in the dark; I open my eyes wider. When Sawyer steps forward, Kaplan is able to identify him--from about two feet away by my reckoning--which is probably pretty good for someone who's squinting in the dark.

Baldacci attended the Archie Bunker school of word choice, and selects his words more for what they sound like than what they mean. He has characters "alight into" a car. (You can't alight "into" a car; you can only alight "out of" a car.) Kaplan squints in the "rapidly failing" light. "Failing?" How about "fading?" On page 378 (which is almost as dense with hilarious inconsistencies as page 85), Baldacci reports that "a twitch erupted over Sidney's left eye." A twitch can't erupt. A twitch is minor. A "spasm" could erupt. How about just writing "Her left eyelid twitched?" Later, "Sidney struggled mightily not to perceptibly wince at the remark." Aside from the split infinitive, I think it would be as easy to notice a woman "struggling mightily" as to notice her wincing "perceptibly." Still further down the page, "Sidney felt herself trembling." What's does Baldacci mean by that? Did she reach out with one hand and feel the other hand trembling, or did she "notice" rather than "feel" that she was trembling? Throughout the book, most things happen "suddenly" as in "Steve suddenly criticized Baldacci's book on amazon.com."

The book is written almost exclusively in the passive voice. The sentence construction is truly impressive in that you would never think it was possible to twist certain words into a passive formation: "Sidney's legs were put by her into the front of the car." Weird things happen with people's legs throughout the book. Lee Sawyer walks on "telephone pole size legs" (presumably Baldacci is referring to thickness, not length). In one scene, Baldacci says "Sidney's legs began walking down the street." (We never learn where the rest of her went in that particular scene.)

This book requires the reader to suspend his or her disbelief, and in that it excels. You will be able to practice suspending your disbelief in laws of physics, human nature, business practices, legal procedings, police procedure, modern computing, and virtually every other topic Baldacci addresses.

After reading the first 10 pages, I was surprised that the book had been published at all. After the first 50, I kept reading for the amusement of seeing characters that were so silly and a plot that was so contrived -- and because other people on the airplane had taken all the more literary reading material, such as Seventeen and Tiger Beat magazines.

After 250 pages, I squinted my eyes and suddenly became convinced that Baldacci was 15 or 16 years old. The author changes voice and tense frequently, but mostly writes in third person omniscient. Readers are given full access to every thought every character in the book has for the duration of the adventure, and most of those are at the junior high level. If you read the book as a description of junior high school students role playing attorneys, FBI agents, computer programmers, and so on, it actually makes a lot of sense. Reinforcing my guess, Baldacci's word choices are mostly at about the 5th grade level, but every 3 or 4 pages he throws in a word like "brook," as in "Sidney's telephone-pole sized legs would brook no thought of walking down the street." I concluded that Baldacci was studying for the SAT as he wrote this book and worked in a lot of the words from his SAT study guide.

I didn't make it all the way to the ending, but I imagine it ends something like this:

Sidney's eyelids were made to coolly squint at the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. "Miranda Shmiranda," she extemporized. Her hand suddenly slapped the Chief Justice on the lower left side of his cheek. The Chief Justice immediately froze and winked with pain. "That will show him to deny my appeal," she thought to herself, smacking her gum as her legs walked down Wall Street and off into the sunset.

This was my first David Baldacci book and not the usual genre of books I read, but I found it to be a face-paced, exciting tale of industrial espionage and counter-espionage. The many characters and numerous plots twists and turns keep the reader engrossed throughout the almost 700 pages. Written in 1997, the computer and internet technology described may have been somewhat complicated then, but today in 2002, is very easy to read and comprehend. My one criticism is that, like many other authors today, Baldacci appeared to be writing this novel with a screenplay already in mind. Yes, it would make a great movie - but I think he was making that assumption just a tad too early.

I thought this book wasn't bad by today's standards. I like a lot of action in a story, however, and it fell somewhat short in that area. I enjoyed parts of it, especially the last couple of chapters, and any more that's about as good as the mainstream fiction work gets.

This is the first Baldacci novel I have ever read and I have to say that I am most impressed. The story is very, very entertaining and the pace of this book is very consistent. Baldacci can make even the most minor character engaging, there are enough surprise involved to keep you into it, and the conclusion comes from nowhere. This book is worth the sleep you will miss trying to finish it.