Finished Mo 6/30/25
This was a paperback that Janny loaned to me, but I know I have a copy that I had read before.
A poor woman is given the opportunity to win $100 million in the national lottery. Her benefactor pays her $25 million and keeps the hundred million for ten years. The real money is made on the interest. That's a simple premise, but it works and the book is compelling to the very end.
From Kirkus:
"Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)"
From 'Bookskeptic.com':
"The premise here is quite simple – LuAnn Tyler is a twenty years old poor waitress with a small baby and a good-for-nothing wannabe drug dealer partner. For the sake of the plot she is incredibly beautiful, unbelievably strong and her moral compass is impeccable. Up to a point of course, when she is offered an opportunity of a certain win in a lottery by a shady character initially she refuses (oh, how high this horse is). However, upon her return home she discovers her partner brutally murdered and is attacked herself. Barely managing to escape with her baby safe she decides to accept the offer, as much for safety as to assure a better future for her child.
As we can expect the offer is too good to be true and has strings attached all over. Eventually LuAnn wins the lottery and has to leave the US never to return. Only after ten years that’s exactly what she does. And as we can predict all hell breaks lose.
Is it believable? Not one bit. But if you suspend your internal reality check it can be fun. Let’s be honest we’re not reading it for complex characterization or development. It’s all for action and there’s plenty of it, especially once FBI get’s involved (the IRS is not that interesting). There are some annoying bits too, like the fact that we are constantly reminded of LuAnn’s physical prowess, or the whole romantic bit (really, the book would work equally well without it). But all in all it is what you expect from Baldacci, a quick paced action thriller. Maybe not one of his best, but does the job nonetheless… as long as you keep your expectations in check and keep in mind the book was published in 1998."
