Rating: 
Summary: Another page turner
Review: Web London is a tough guy - a member of the Hostage Rescue Team, the best of the best. And yet, going into a routine mission, he simply froze. And the rest of his team died in an ambush. He makes it his mission to find out what really happened. Throw in numberous obstacles, betrayals from unlikely sources, tough guys and gunpower...An excellent page turner and a highly recommended book. (sorry, no plot details). By the way, my favourite (briefly appearing) character is Angie, a fellow HRT's wife, who scares the living daylights out of the best of them.
Rating: 
Summary: A surprisingly good story
Review: I have to confess that when a co-worker lent me the tapes for Last Man Standing, I was prepared to dislike it. It's not my genre. And it was so long. To my surprise, I found it engrossing and at the end, I had enjoyed it. Admittedly it is a guy's book. High-powered guns and cars, beautiful women (although mostly rather prim and proper) and heroic deeds by both Web London (the protagonist) and his friends. The villains are evil, for the most part, and there are plenty of them. The only thing approaching a mystery is whether London is one of the good guys or a bad one. However, given the number of villains, it is difficult to sort out which ones might have set London up. Jason Culp the narrator, does a creditable job of differentiating between various characters, without being hokey. Although the ending is a bit sad, and has a couple of surprises, it is satisfying. Those readers who enjoy techno-thrillers, such as Tom Clancy's work, will probably enjoy this one. Readers of police procedurals and thrillers will probably enjoy it too.
Rating:
Summary: Last Man Standing
Review: Web London roars into a dark alley one night with his FBI Hostage Rescue Team. Seconds later, the team is ambushed & every man is dead--except Web. As the FBI conducts their investigation, the suspicion surrounding Web deepens. Now, he needs help from an unlikely ally in his desperate search for the killer of his friends, & finds himself up against a force determined to finish the job that began in the alley--killing the seventh & sole surviving member of Charlie Team, Web London.
Rating:
Summary: Action-filled book!
Review: David Baldacci has created an interesting character in Web London, an FBI specialist in hostage recovery. He is tough and smart, but also strangely vulnerable because of incidents from his childhood which he has repressed. At the beginning of the book, he participates in a raid where he is the only survivor from the elite Charlie Company of which he is an integral part. His survival guilt drives him to discover who is behind the massacre and why he froze up and thus did not enter the area where the killing occurred. He is helped by Clair Daniels, a beautiful divorcee who also happens to be a psychiatrist. The plot has a satisfying number of twists and turns and is complex enough to take several chapters to unfold at the end. This book has both an interesting plot and a complex hero which makes for a very good read.
Rating: 
Summary: Nothing special.
Review: Nothing special and a little disappointing because there were no surprising twists. Not his best work. I expected the story would be similar to the movie by this name but it was a totally different story. Long, long, long audio book...and the second last tape was defective and I had to get a replacement from Amazon, which was very annoying.
Rating:
Summary: Not bad but falls at the last fence...
Review: FBI agent left as only survivor of an ambush tries to find the truth behind the incident.
Very pacy story with a good background on Hostage Rescue (the author had help from Chris Whitcombe in this area) this book only lets itself down in the last fifth where too many co-incidences and links come together rather too quickly.
Okay there is some dialogue that is weak but although some of the twists were a little signposted, some of them do still surprise. This is not an exceptional book, but if you like the authors previous works then I suspect you will like this one too.
Rating: 
Summary: UGH!
Review: Laughable dialogue, outlandish plot, zero-dimensional characters, pc run amuck and no editing. My favorite howler involved a blindfolded woman in a dark room who had her blindfold removed and then had to wait for her eyes to adjust to the dark. And one more reference to the hero's "issues" would have driven me over the edge. Take this book! Please!
Rating:
Summary: Where was the editor?
Review: Boy, does this book need a good editor! It needs to lose at least 200 pages of more than we need to know exposition. There is a good story, but it takes too long for it to get going.
Rating:
Summary: Nothing in this book rings remotely true
Review: I've been entertained by Balducci's past books, most notably The Winner, and I can accept a certain amount of fantastic plotting as well as the next person. However, the magnitude of convoluted plotting and superhuman heroics dumped on the unsuspecting reader in Last Man Standing goes over the line. The hero, an improbably named Web London, is an FBI hostage rescue expert who lives with bordeline psychosis and the ability to heal from his repeated life-threatening wounds. He is the only man to survive an ambush and drags his survivor guilt thoughout the remainder of the book like the carcass of a moose. Balducci is clearly riding on his reputation in this maddening book.
Rating:
Summary: Fun, need-to-take-your mind-off-life book!
Review: I grabbed this thinking I had read Baldacci before...I think I got my authors mixed up. I was not real thrilled to realize this was not a member of the mystery genre, but was actually and action thriller. Even though I've read plenty of Tom Clancy's books, I don't usually go looking for this type of book. The last few trips down this particular genre have not been that great. Clancy is mass producing books of this sort now, and that usually means the level of writing skill has gone down. Action-thrillers tend to be written by men and for men. That means the language is a little saltier then I like it in comparison to mysteries (especially mysteries written by the British). This book started out slow, but gained momentum quickly. I was pleasantly surprised to see the language was relatively good, and the writing was excellent (I did spot several typographical errors...don't publishers check for this stuff any more?). Another reader of this book stated that the plot was ridiculous. I don't think so...after 9/11 I don't think very many plots are impossible or improbable. I am sure many hold the same view as me. If you had asked me several years ago, whether we would have seen the things that occurred at Waco, in Oklahoma, the various men who have betrayed their countries and families, the ability of drug cartels to impact our society, and what happened in September of 2001...I would have said you are reading too much fictional garbage. Now, it is possible to believe the worst, not only of others, but of our society and the priorities we have. Baldacci seems to be a good writer. I qualify that as I am going to have to read more of his books to see if this is a typical literary excursion for him. His story about the FBI hostage rescue team is extremely interesting. I certainly have not read anything along this line before, and I enjoyed the new information. That he had to do research on much of the book is obvious from all the people he had to thank at the end. Men and women who enjoy thrillers, people with background in the horse breeding industry, anyone who enjoys good writing and needs a break from their everyday existence will find this an excellent book to take on a trip or to the beach. Karen Sadler
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