Hour Game

As you may recall, I have a bit of a love hate relationship with David Baldacci. I read a couple of his on holiday earlier this year and wanted to read this as it features the same two detectives, Sean and Michelle, an attractive if mis-matched pair -- Sean, in his forties, living in a tidy and beautiful house, a lover of fine wine and peace and quiet, and Michelle, 32, an ex-Olympic sportswoman, strong, outspoken, radically untidy and disorganised in her living conditions. They are a working partnership but not a romantic one, though one of the pleasures of reading about them is the undercurrent of attraction that is obvious but never spoken or acted on. Here, though, both are drawn to other people, with, it's safe to say, rather disastrous results. The plot is very intriguing -- a hunt for a serial killer, with many sub-plots which, as you may guess, will all turn out to be relevant in the end.  So for those reasons it is an enjoyable read -- but oh, David, I wish you could learn to write better dialogue. Clunky hardly encompasses the sheer awfulness of it in places. Why do these writers (Dan Brown is another) not listen to how people really speak? My advice is the same I used to give to students -- read it aloud and see how it sounds! You would soon see how truly ludicrous it frequently becomes.