The Winner - Softcover

David Baldacci

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330545167 ISBN 13: 9780330545167

Publisher: Pan, 2011

Synopsis

The Winner by David Baldacci is the taut tale of a woman forced to take a gamble with her future, from one of the world's bestselling thriller writers.

LuAnn Tyler is a single mother striving to escape a life of endless poverty. So when she gets a mysterious offer to be the guaranteed winner of the hundred million dollar lottery, it's like her prayers have been answered.

But LuAnn refuses - and less than twenty-four hours later she's fighting for her life and on the run from a false murder charge. The offer - and its condition that she leave the country forever - seems her only hope.

Ten years later, LuAnn secretly returns to the US to begin a new life with Matthew Riggs, a man whose origins are as murky as her own. But there are those who have picked up her trail - and it seems Matthew is the only one who can help her. But is he, too, closing in for the kill?

About this title

Review:

What would you do to change your life? LuAnn is beautiful, young and dirt poor. She's married to a low-level drugs dealer whose infidelities and incompetent double-dealing put her and her child's lives at risk. Enter master-criminal "Jackson" who offers her vast wealth if she agrees to help him fiddle the lottery. She refuses until she finds herself on the run from false charges of murder. After years abroad she returns because she wants her daughter to be an American teenager. Can she escape the FBI, an inquisitive journalist and the murderous and endlessly ingenious Jackson?

The Winner is a departure for Baldacci. LuAnn is as plucky and resourceful as the heroines of Absolute Power and Total Control, but the plot she inhabits is a new departure for him. Normally he shows us a dark vision of how things really work, but here he brings to life and makes plausible what might have been pulp cliches. As in the description of Jackson, a master of disguise: "Sitting across from her was her double, or the double of the woman she had just become. The same short red hair, facial complexion, crooked nose, everything--it was as though she had suddenly discovered a twin". What's more, his method of rigging lotteries is clever and convincing enough to worry lottery organisers the world over. Perhaps the sunniest and least cynical of Baldacci's thrillers, The Winner is an intelligent, exciting and deeply moral read whose switchback plot is full of surprises and touching moments. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

"FLAT-OUT FUN TO READ...A WILDFIRE OF A THRILLER THAT RIVALS ABSOLUTE POWER FOR SUSPENSE, EXCITEMENT". -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0330545167
• ISBN 13: 9780330545167
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 592