No Time Left (Kindle Single) [Kindle Edition]

Monday, March 19, 2012

No Time Left (Kindle Single) [Kindle Edition]

By : David Baldacci
Price : $0.99

Customer Reviews

I had pre-ordered this and forgot about it until it showed up on my Kindle this morning. It's a pretty good short story, but I do want to emphasize the short: it took me about five minutes to read it. You can usually get a pretty good gauge of how long a Kindle book is by the size (in kilobytes) on the book description page, and I thought this one would be longer at almost 200 KB - it must be the graphics at the end advertising other Baldacci books.
The story has an interesting little plot, but not much character development or interaction due to the length of the short story. However, Baldacci does a good job of getting you interested in the character - this really could have been the outline of a full-length novel, and I think it would be a good diversion for Baldacci as I really haven't liked his last two novels which appear to have been primarily written by others. You do have a pretty good idea of how the story concludes about 75% of the way through it.
To summarize, this is a pretty good short story and Baldacci fans should like it. I did!

Literature has always been about concise, good writing that draws the reader in quickly. Short stories have always been good reading material for everyone. They can be put into magazines, chronicled in anthologies and also used to train new students in how to write, how to think and how to make your story concise without loosing detail.
I had no idea what a Kindle Single was but thought I would try this one since I do love David Baldacci's writing.
This very short story deals with the life of a paid assassin who does his job well. We have a quick look at his latest job and then follow him as he meets a new client for an "challenging" job. But what could be so challenging about what appears to be a very strait forward killing. He sees nothing challenging about it.
But that is where Baldacci catches us. The man does his job quickly and well, but as soon as he has dispatched the victim he realizes that he has made a grave mistake. This story will take you about ten minutes to read and will leave you with the desire to read more.
Maybe Amazon will package these Kindle Singles into an anthology so that we have a larger gathering of short stories in one volume.
Enjoy!