The Winner Mass Market Author: Visit Amazon's David Baldacci Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0446606324 | Format: PDF
The Winner Mass Market Description
From Library Journal
Absolute Power. Total Control. And now The Winner: Baldacci doesn't settle for second best. Here, his heroine, who gets rich after being forced to participate in a fixed lottery, is wanted for murder.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be--poor, undereducated but proud--and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection) --
Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
See all Editorial Reviews
- Mass Market Paperback: 656 pages
- Publisher: Vision (December 1, 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0446606324
- ISBN-13: 978-0446606325
- Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
I read this book about 5 years ago, and then again recently. I had forgotten enough that the re-read felt like I was reading it for the first time. And as I re-read it, I remembered why I had liked it so much.
In short, Baldacci gives us both a fantastic protagonist and an equally fantastic antagonist in this story. He delivers an excellent thriller with a highly imaginative, highly original plot. It's all the right ingredients for a best-selling page turner.
Our heroine, LuAnn Tyler, is poor white trash but with supermodel looks, tomboy athletic prowess, and never-say-die tenacity. A single mom barely out of her teens, LuAnn works nights waitressing at the local truck stop to make ends meet for her and her infant daughter. She dreams of giving a better life to her daughter, but with no money, no education, and no prospects, it appears that LuAnn's life is destined to be nothing more than unrealized dreams in a shabby trailer at the end of a shabby dirt road.
But all of that could change in the blink of an eye as LuAnn stumbles across a remarkable opportunity when she goes to interview for a job at the local mall: a man who never reveals his identity explains to LuAnn that he has rigged the national lottery and offers to give her a winning ticket. However, there's a catch - she must leave the USA and never return while the mystery man invests her millions for her.
Fast forward 10 years. Now we find our protagonist fabulously wealthy, fabulously educated, fabulously refined, and still fabulously beautiful, but fabulously unfulfilled as well. LuAnn is profoundly weary of living as a quasi-recluse in countries not her own - and ultimately ashamed of the facade she's constructed to shield her daughter from her mother's true origins.
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