Review of The 6:20 Man
The thriller genre is not my favorite to read. I think this book deserves that up front warning. I don't know why I picked this book. Nothing about it stands out to me. But I gave it a shot and the results were pretty blah.
The story of The 6:20 Man by David Baldacci is a straight murder mystery cop on the run type of book. It could be any number of action movies or crime dramas you see on television. The story is fine, it trickles the details as you go through it and you can easily follow along with what is happening and why. But there is nothing spectacular about the story. It feels very generic.
The characters were a weak point for me. Again, they feel very generic. You have the tough guy on the run. You have the hard nosed investigators. You have the flirtatious bad girl. The woman whose career is more than herself... Every character feels like a stereotype, which is not a bad thing. My biggest issue is they all kind of talk the same and have generic sounding names. As the book went on I got them mixed up. I couldn't remember who was who and had to put together context clues in each scene. This is probably me being bad with names, but the just didn't feel different from one another.
The writing is fine. It is medium level on description. It bores a lot of dialogue, so if dialogue is your thing this one will work well for you. The author had a tendency to blue the lines between the main characters thoughts and the narrator, who was not the main character. It is basic third person limited. It was an interesting mix almost as if the narrator is telling you the story, but occasionally can read the main characters mind....
Overall this book felt very.... generic... That is not a bad thing. If you love crime-mystery-thrillers then this is a good book for you. It is not the best of the genre, but it hits all the important points.
If I can make a suggestion...
The Mr. Mercedes Series by Stephen King. This is a great crime thriller series. It is Stephen King so be prepared for some gruesomeness and it does go a little horror fantasy by the end of it, but this story and its set of characters are so much fun.
The Chase by Clive Cussler. This is set back in the early nineteen hundreds and is also a series. But the first book is surprising and fun. Lots of little details about the time period also. Definitely worth it.
The Pelican Brief by John Grisham. I read this looking for a court room drama, but ended up with a person on the run trying to solve a murder. This is a little more political, but it makes for a more dramatic story.
Shady Cross by James Hankins. Kidnapping story, but still the same crime drama thriller type of book. I enjoyed this one, but felt it was way better suited as a movie. It was a fast read and very very visual.
Now I always throw in one of my own here at the end. But as of right now I don't have anything I've written that really fits. So, I will suggest that you keep an eye out for The American Martyr. It's a political thriller that I recently finished and will be publishing sometime in the near future. The basic premise... When a group of teenagers get drafted into a war that has nearly a zero percent survival rate, they take matters into their own hands and protest the war with a mass suicide, but Brian survives and becomes the scapegoat of a generation. Below is an AI generated image that I had made for the book.
