Publisher's Weekly Review
Sidney Archer is sent reeling when she learns that her husband Jason, an executive at a top technology conglomerate, was aboard a plane that went down with no survivors. Then she gets some good news: Jason didn't make the flight. And some bad news: he's on the run from the FBI, which suspects him of causing the crash. And now, Sidney is being chased by Lee Sawyer, a hardboiled FBI special agent who is falling in love with her, and a resourceful, relentless assassin, who isn't. Jonathan Marosz narrates this audio edition with a high energy, breezy style that not only maintains, but intensifies, listener interest. He also manages to clarify the author's detailed explanations of how various cutting-edge technologies work by vocally emphasizing key points. Marosz selects voices that match the attitudes of the novel's many characters, from the puzzled but determined Sidney to the equally determined and logical Sawyer, whose gruff delivery softens as his feelings for Sidney intensify. A Vision paperback. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In a hugger-mugger attempt to follow up his bestselling Absolute Power (1996), Baldacci pits a young widow against corporate villains who want her silenced at all costs. When her husband Jason apparently dies in the crash of a jetliner bound from Washington to L.A., Sidney Archer's near- perfect world implodes. A high-powered attorney working on the latest merger planned by Triton Global (a high-tech multinational that employed Jason on hush-hush computer projects), she can't accept that the beloved father of her precocious little daughter Amy is dead. Sidney's subliminal faith is not misplaced. Jason, who had shopped his company's darkest secrets in an effort to make a quick financial killing, switched planes before takeoff and is alive but not well in Seattle. On the day of his funeral, Sidney hears from him via phone. She keeps her own counsel, but Lee Sawyer (an FBI agent assigned to the case) is suspicious because available evidence suggests that Jason not only sabotaged the downed aircraft but also engineered a megabuck embezzlement. Presciently, however, the missing man had encrypted his proof of Triton's misdeeds on a duplicate disk that he mailed to himself before disappearing. Eager to get a printout that could clear Jason, Sidney sets out on a roundabout odyssey that takes her from suburban Virgina to Manhattan and points north. Although Triton's corrupt CEO and his murderous, stop-at-nothing minions are on her trail, clever Sidney foils them at almost every turn. With help from a besotted Sawyer, the pistol-packin' mama also begins unraveling the mystery of her mate's vanishing act. In a violent climactic confrontation on the stormy coast of Maine, the two learn the truth about an immense conspiracy in which Jason's fate is but a sideshow. A talky, tedious tale of an unlikely heroine's desperate life on the run, longer on confusion than suspense or narrative coherence. (Main selection of the Literary Guild; $500,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Booklist Review
Baldacci burst on the thriller scene with Absolute Power (1995), which stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for more than four months. Total Control is even more suspenseful, and it is also far more interesting in terms of the questions it raises about how much technology controls us. Baldacci's ruthless characters wield the latest in action weaponry, laptops, and cell phones. Everyone still carries guns, but they're fighting over computer disks and trying to outsmart each other with frantically typed e-mail. Except for a sabotaged airliner that hits the ground with enough impact to practically disintegrate, creating a huge crater in rural Virginia and killing a couple of hundred innocent people, and a bunch of vicious murders, all the crime is online, involving the stealing of top-secret financial documents pertaining to high-tech companies with names such as Triton and CyberCom. Baldacci's heroes are also a mix of the old and the new: a bighearted FBI guy and a beautiful, high-powered attorney who really just wants to stay home and take care of the kids. Maybe so, but when her husband disappears, Sidney Archer transforms herself from corporate deal-maker into a gun-toting momma with a sure shot and enough smarts to outmaneuver her very angry, very evil assailants. Good and slick. --Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
The night that a plane crash kills 181 souls including her husband, Jason, Sidney Archer is unwittingly thrust into a tailspin of her own. When the FBI fingers Jason as the plane's saboteur, other deceptions are revealed, and Sidney is forced to seek the truth. After receiving a shocking phone call from Jason telling her that he is innocent and to trust no one, Sidney employs her skills as a high-powered corporate attorney on a dangerous quest to prove her husband's innocence. Sidney avoids the FBI and skirts those who would see her dead. Her only hope is a password-protected floppy disk containing information that can prove her husband's innocence. Given that Baldacci published this best seller in 1997, story elements central to the plot are quite dated, making the novel somewhat anticlimactic. Narrator Jonathan Marosz reads well and gives this outdated tale the energy it needs to keep listeners intrigued. Verdict Not recommended for small libraries with limited space and budgets. However, libraries collecting a larger scope of popular authors' works might consider adding this audiobook for their die-hard Baldacci fans. ["No one is immune here from high-tech snooping and violent death. Baldacci writes strictly for action, not wasting time developing characters or setting. Few books have higher heaps of dead millionaires at their conclusion," read the review of the Warner hc, LJ 1/97.-Ed.]-JoAnn Funderburk, South Garland Branch Lib., TX (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
