Review: This is a dud
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 13, 2011
David Baldacci is one of my favorite writers and I have read almost everything that he has written. However, this fails miserably as a short story.Without giving anything away, a mystery man hires a hit man and specifies a certain train for the hit man to take to reach the town where his target lives. The hit man falls asleep on the train, and when he wakes up at his destination he finds himself 50 years in the past. But being the consummate professional, the hit man simply ignores his time travel and focuses on finding his target.The time travel on the train is unoriginal, and is more appropriate for a Twilight Zone episode (there actually was one involving someone falling asleep on the train and waking up in another time). In addition, although the hit man makes a certain discovery about his target, followed by an experience that ends the story, everything that happens is very predictable and something that I easily figured out well in advance.Worse, as another review notes, Baldacci offers no explanation as to why the hit man was hired to kill this particular target, let alone any information about the background of the man who hired him (which might shed some light on motivation). As a result an ending that might have saved an otherwise trite short story just doesn't make any sense.Much as I admire David Baldacci, this short story is just not worth your time. The only reason that I gave it two stars instead of one is because it is still better than some of the 99 cent dreadful purchases I have made of would be authors.