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good suspense thriller about fixed lottery winner trying to get her life back.

Generally, I like David Baldacci, however I felt the premise of this book was completely unbelievable. After reading the first few chapters I put it down and did not finish it. ( )

LuAnn Tyler is a beautiful, "white trash" truck stop waitress with a useless husband and a really cute baby daughter. A few months after the birth of the daughter, Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call telling her to go to an office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. Now why anyone would do this after receiving a summons like this and especially after seeing the location...would be anybody's guess. Most sensible people would never have done this in a hundred million years. Once there, she gets an unbelievable offer from a "Mr. Jackson", a monomaniacal, cross-dressing... (I liked that touch) ...manipulator who says he knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. (Maybe I can use Mr. Jackson's talents after all!) He says that LuAnn fits the media's idea of what a lottery winner should be...namely. poor, undereducated...but still mighty proud. I began to question LuAnn's mentality a lot at this point. Mr. Jackson tells her that IF she's willing to buy the right ticket.... at the right time... and then when she wins, transfer most of her huge jackpot winnings to him...then she'll be able to retire in luxury. Of course, as we knew would be the case, there is more that he doesn't tell her. Jackson fails to inform her, that if she refuses his offer, he'll simply...just have her killed. Here's where it became even worse for delusional LuAnn. She barely escapes death when one of her husband's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a train to Manhattan with the hired executioner in hot pursuit. The executioner is one of Jackson's paid handlers and he can't help but hear wedding bells loud and clear when he sees LuAnn with her baby daughter. Wouldn't you know it!?...a winning 100-million-dollar lottery drawing complicates everything....as if things weren't already complicated enough...Jackson now spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in, as they say..."hot pursuit". Never fear dear reader...not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent, and more unbelievable predicaments, but she'll also manage to outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in luxury in Switzerland. Overall...it's too preposterous to call feminine wish-fulfillment and too formulaic to be really suspenseful. I could hardly believe that David Baldacci actually wrote this. Maybe he was a victim of an alien invasion that took over his body and wrote a "best seller". The ridiculousness of it was in itself entertaining, and I do usually like what David Baldacci pens when his head is on straight...so 4 stars. ( )

This was from a local free library, and I needed something a bit light to read. I generally enjoy Baldacci's books, but this one is not his best effort. Almost cartoonish in its stereotypes... It did mostly distract me from the news. ( )