Fiction Addict

Genre: Suspense

Publisher: Morrow

Publication Date:  1998

Reviewed by Jennifer S. Roman

Imagine being a 20-year-old single mom living in rural Georgia.  You have only a seventh-grade education, and your meager income is from waiting tables at the local truck stop.  You live with your baby daddy out of necessity; he has a trailer you can call “home.”  He is frequently drunk and therefore does not hold a steady job.  Suddenly, you are guaranteed to win the national lottery of $100 million, and all you have to do is leave the country for ten years.  How could someone with such a bleak future resist?

This is the situation faced by LuAnn Tyler, an intelligent and extremely beautiful girl who, originally, prepares to decline the offer until she comes home to find her baby daddy dead from a drug deal gone sour.  She walks in on the killer and becomes his next target.  Knowing there is no way the police would believe her innocence, she takes the deal.  Her benefactor, Jackson, doesn’t like the extra baggage she brings in the form of an arrest warrant, but he looks to it as a challenge and fixes the national lottery.  Getting her out of the country gets hairy at times, but finally, he puts LuAnn on a plane to Sweden.

Of course there has to be a twist: ten years later, LuAnn decides to return to the United States, and a reporter covering high bankruptcy rates of lottery winners notices that she and eleven other winners actually earn, not lose, money after winning the lottery.  That puts him on the scent of a huge story that threatens LuAnn’s family and her very life.

Baldacci really gives the reader a reason to not put the book down.  From introducing LuAnn and her situation to describing how the lottery will be fixed to watching the plan in action, he makes the characters real and the story, while a bit over the top, fun and suspenseful.  It’s a bit sad when getting to the end because there’s that desire to read more.  I was constantly wondering what would happen next.  The mastermind behind the scam is resourceful and intelligent.  What he could do today would be absolutely amazing.

There is a bit of vulgar language and a couple of mild sex scenes, but the big caution here is the graphic violence.  It is not near the top of my list of violent books, but it does describe how Jackson kills people in cold blood.  What is disturbing is that he does not show remorse or a bit of reverence toward human life.  Readers who can handle some violence should be fine.