Helpful Score: 1
I would not say this is one of Baldacci's best works. In fact, I enjoyed it less than any other book of his that I have read. There are so many characters and moving pieces in the story, that sometimes it seemed convoluted. Very hard to keep track of who was the good guy versus the bad guy, and far too many names to keep track of. Here is a paraphrased example of what a lot of the book felt like I was reading: âUp until the showdown with A, you were just blackmailing B at the XYZ. But C found out things about A that D wouldn't want B to know, so A killed C at the DEF.â YIKES! Even after reading the whole book, there were so many characters involved that reading a sentence like that just made my head spin.
I liked this book. It's a fast read even though it's 450 pages long - but it doesn't drag. It is set in the Los Angeles of the early 1960s, mostly around the movie industry and from what I remember myself, it does a good job of evoking that era - the things people did, the way they lived, rich or poor, the artifacts of their daily lives - real places and names and a good sense of what LA felt like. Very entertaining.
