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| Simple Genius | 
 enlarge | Author: David Baldacci
Publisher: Pan Books
Category: Book
List Price: £6.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 5627
Media: Paperback
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7 x 4.4 x 1.7
ISBN: 0330450972
EAN: 9780330450973
ASIN: 0330450972
Publication Date: November 2, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Very light shelf wear. No inscriptions. Sent by first class mail.
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Amazon.co.uk
With a series of ever more accomplished novels, David Baldacci has been building something of a reputation for himself as one of the most reliable practitioners of the modern crime/thriller novel. The emphasis is, of course, usually on Baldacci's metier, the legal arena, and it's clearly the field he is most comfortable in -- as in Simple Genius. His long-term protagonists, Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, have found that the aftermath of their last case has stayed with them in an unpleasant way, and Michelle is obliged to undergo therapy. Sean, his financial circumstances straightened, takes on a job. A scientist is dead in a nearby town -- the scene of the (possible) crime is a clandestine research institute peopled by a large cast of neurotic scientists. There are secrets galore to be unearthed here, and just across the river from the institute there is another clandestine institution, the CIA training ground, Camp Peary, where the dead man's body was originally discovered. Sean finds himself at bay, with several government security services on his tail, even as Michelle struggles to regain her mental equilibrium. As in such page-turning thrillers as Hour Game and Split Second, David Baldacci knows how to keep the reader thoroughly engrossed, and never loses the capacity to surprise us with the revelations that his beleaguered hero and heroine become party to. This is one of the longest Baldacci books, weighing in at nearly 600 pages, and there are lengthy appendices after the novel proper has finished. These may not retrospectively add to the appeal of the book of the reader has just finished, but they show that Baldacci has -- as always -- done his homework. --Barry Forshaw
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 A reflection on the miserable Bush-ist West October 19, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
There is a fascinating style in Baldacci's books. We are always dealing with state business and crime intertwined in the plot. In this case the CIA, the FBI and the DEA are concerned. They are shown as shady and even dangerous if not criminal from the very start. Then two intriguing levels are woven into the narrative fabric. Babbage Town, a research center next to a major CIA base in Virginia. That highly private and secret research center is dealing with quantum computers, the generation promised to us for the next decade or the decade after the next. These computers will be so powerful that there will be no protection against their power and that may make the whole world crash because of an implosion in its mechanical brain (which is a rewriting of the `Terminator' axiom, or that of `Matrix'). Babbage Town is thus dedicated to that research in order to come to results first and have the necessary time to invent the protection before it is released on the market. The author takes great pleasure at sharing the grotesqueness of these scientific geniuses doing the research, and yet their normal ambivalence as for right and wrong, duty and betrayal makes them pathetic in all possible ways. The second level added to the plot is that of the private investigators hired by the owners of Babbage Town to solve the mystery of a suspicious death that seems to be a suicide of one of the scientists on the CIA base. These two people, that couple or pair, have left CIA, Secret Service or whatever, to run private. And they have their own problem, a relational problem, and - for the woman Michelle - some deep subconscious old conflict that disturbs her in her ability to cope with some crisis situation. When all the actors are on the stage you have to provide them with a plot. It is Afghanistan. When the West decided to take Afghanistan over the Talibans had eradicated the cultivation of opium poppies. But the occupation of the country has apparently brought its economy down and opium poppies started to be cultivated again and the brother of the Afghan President has recently been implicated in that drug dealing. The book pretends the CIA has been entrusted with buying this crop to prevent the profit from ending in the hands of the terrorists, and then destroying it. This shows how limited our dealing with the problem of terrorism is, how ineffective. We are not able to bring modern development to the Afghans because we have no way to make it as profitable as opium can be. The idea in the book is absurd because the USA cannot buy all the opium - or heroin - produced by Afghanistan without distorting the market: artificially low offer would increase the price of the drug, which would encourage its production. In other words that dealing with the problem goes against the principles of market economy, increases if not multiplies the problem, and thus is doomed to fail. But the worst part of this aspect of the book is that it shows how our invading Afghanistan was based on our absolute distrust in history and its power to produce progress from the very dynamic contradictions of any situation, and also on our foolish belief that democracy could be exported by military forces and the use of violence. Of course the book is nothing but a novel. So suspend your disbelief slightly. Yet we are dealing with politics and nothing else, so there cannot be any suspension, of any disbelief. It is too dangerous to suspend our disbelief: it breeds historical mistakes or crimes that could be prevented if disbelief had not been suspended (Auschwitz and the Shoah for one example: still in 1938 it was possible to stop the war machine of the enterprising criminals who were starting the Shoah then. But we did not have the courage to do it and we suspended our disbelief, or is it suspended our knowledge?)
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
 (3.5*) Sadly simple but no genius... August 16, 2008
This was my first Baldacci and I found it all surface shine with very little underneath. The premise sounded intriguing: a quasi-secret code-breaking establishment working on inventing the quantum computer, set in the midst of both a US Naval establishment and a CIA facility. And with all the gumf about code-breaking etc (which Baldacci inserts well) I was looking forward to a bit of intellectual puzzlement. Sadly this is all pretty much irrelevant to the actual story, which doesn't really involve code-breaking or ciphers at all, and could equally well have been set anywhere that happened to be next door to the CIA.
The two protagonists are pleasant enough company, and the writing has an ease and flow that keeps the pages turning in a leisurely but never edge-of-your-seat kind of way. As another reviewer has mentioned there are really two stories going on here and while they sort of integrate, they don't add anything to each other.
With a whole load of stuff thrown in: the said quantum-computers, WW2 Enigma machines, buried colonial treasure, murder, drug-smuggling, secret airplanes, the possibility of terrorist torture chambers, the FBI, the CIA, the DEA... there's more than enough to keep us occupied, but at heart this is a very simple story. I had to giggle at the end when the police are called in to `arrest' the CIA!
So overall this is a competent and fun read: not obtrusive and desperate over-writing, characters whose company you can enjoy, a bit of gentle mystery etc, but it's no more than that. As other reviewers have said, Baldacci rather over-eggs the whole thing with his characters' names (Turing, Ventris, Chadwick, Champ Pollion: the `inventor' of the computer; the decipherers of linear B, the decipherer of the hieroglyphs) and there are likely to be others that I just wasn't aware off. This seems a little childish and unnecessary since code-breaking isn't really necessary to the story... and he caps it with Valerie Messaline, a nod to Valeria Messalina more commonly known as Messalina the wife of the emperor Claudius immortalised by Tacitus and Robert Graves' I, Claudius...
So an entertaining 3.5* read but completely throw-away, and it didn't leave me keen to read any more Baldacci.
 not up to standard June 13, 2008
Sometimes authors are tied into a set amount of books and then they struggle to complete the books in the time span allowed. This is how Simple Genius feels to me. I love David Baldacci's books (usually) but this was a huge and bitter disappointment. I found myself wondering all along whether Michelle's adventures would coincide with Sean's adventures, otherwise, what was the point of their being there, apart from having the unbelievable Horatio rushing to both their rescues? I found the names unfortunate, Viggie, for heaven's sake! and the coincidences fit for an Indiana Jones film. Sean needs a way out, and oh my, there just happens to be a forgotten ladder ... he needs something to tie someone up and oh my, there just happens to be cable hanging on an exterior wall of a hut, like that is going to happen ... he needs a change of clothes and oh my, there just happens to be a stash of clothes behind a bush, including conveniently a guard's uniform ... it was too much like that. No tension, no believability, if there is such an expression. If Mr Baldacci needs to have 2 separate threads in a book, he should do the reader the favour, the considerate favour at that, of combining them or at least joining them in some way and bringing one or other thread to a satisfying conclusion. Mr Baldacci admits to taking wild liberties with the place he set the book, he overlooked admitting to taking wild liberties with the reader's suspension of belief that everything that was so obviously contrived.
By way of complete contrast and because my mind needs something to regulate it after all those 'convenient' happenings, I am reading Bill Bryson, a breath of fresh air ...
How the mighty can fall.... May 23, 2008
This is the second Baldacci I've read recently and the deterioration in the quality of his writing over time is now very noticeable.
In this effort, which brings back former agents Sean and Michelle, now acting privately, he also introduces an unbelievably wild plot, albeit delivered with quite a lot of pace. But that's about it.
Coincidence upon coincidence and just so many hard to believe components really killed this book for me. I kept going to the finish but I am sure my groans were quite audible in the end.
In short, in my view, Baldacci is no longer producing well-constructed tales written with flair.
Entertaining thrills April 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is the first Baldacci book I've read and I'll now go back and read others, including the previous Sean and Michelle books (plus I hope there'll be another). I found the book a fun, thrilling and fast read with enough background research to provide added interest (hadn't heard of quantum computers). OK, so at times it felt quickly written and could have done with a little more depth, but I still found the book very enjoyable and I'm surprised at the negative reviews.
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