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Lee Child has really got a good character going with "Reacher". I started the Jack Reacher series somewhere near the end. After being bit by the bug, so to speak, I came back to the start and am proceeding to go through them all.
Try this first and you will be hooked on the rest of the series. Best Child novel in Jack Reacher series.
And Since Child is a Brit, the editor should have cleaned up the Britbonics that this supposedly US soldier uses like mobile phones.they're cells over here.Complaints aside, it's still a fun ride. Every character in the book constantly ends their sentences with "right."It's one thing if one character has this speech tic but when every character does it, then I blame the editor for simply being lazy. Nice to read about someone as smart, tough and dangerous as myself. Many reviewers pointed out the flaws in the Reacher books - he's a superhuman, knows everything etc. But I find his novels a nice escape although the writing style can get extremely annoying.
I read it because 1) I was stuck 2)I paid for it - but I want my money back (really rather have my time back). This stream of consciousness procdural is beyond tedious. It is painful.
Everyone is not without. But it's hard, as bodies keep floating to the surface, and their secrets, left unheard. Southern hospitality welcomed strangers, wanderers, riffraff, ramblers. Some people got annoyed by a few quirks like style, structure, tenses, or that Jack's too mach, that he came to the right conclusion all the time and rarely doubted himself, which, to me, were all small issues when you're trying to find something wrong with a book that was mostly hard to put down. The classic Great American hero, in that familiar Bond, Die Hard, Indiana Jones and Clancy mold, is given a refreshing and chilling color. Perfect houses, manicured lawns, little trouble, everyone content. Should have been nothing. In a small southern town like Margrave, Georgia, everyone knows eachother.
And it is. Jack Reacher, late thirties, tall, lean, buzzed cut that said military every which way, is out of a job as a respected and methodical MP with an impeccable record, and is now an honorably discharged civi. One or two things, like things falling into place a little too easily and smoothly (though Child's is a gifted writer and his writing is compelling and hard to deny) will inevitably nag at you, and any book over 400 pages will do that to anyone. Clean, pristine streets.
Or in this case, a happenstance dropoff he insisted to the Grayhound driver so he could hear how Blind Blake, an old guitarist who had passed through Margrave, had ended his days. Locals, they'd get a quiet reprimand, and eased out slowly, no fuss, no mess. This would make for a great dramatic-thriller movie, despite the slow--but steady--plot. It's not a easy/simple read you'll finish in a day since its so dense with a lot of detail though Child lays it all out fairly well and allows both the reader to piece it together along with Reacher. While I need a break before I pick up the next one, I will, eventually.
Some of the reviews criticized the caricature of Reacher as following the hero-myth-mold too well and that the character was unrealistically macho being too confident. I couldn't put it down until I'd finished it. Eno's was local, very local. Jack Reacher is a man's man, logical, pragmatic, utterly ruthless when needed, and a man who lives day by day and craves freedom, anonymity. No sonnets, but there were some great one liners and interesting introspection that will make you think twice. And so it begins. He's fierce, knows more about guns and weapons than is comfortable, but in a tight fix, he's the man you want watching your back. The structure created a very tight and intense play of action, especially physical action, which was so well done.
It was law. Child's style, did, tend to reduce the emotional element to something more robotic and clinical but that actually works with a mystery thriller like Killing Floor, and a male lead that Child has created. People who know how to make killing look like an art are on his tail, and with a couple of trusty natives to help him find the rest of the clues, Jack is doing all he can to stay one step ahead. In a way, simplicity is sometimes the most elegant and clear-cut, especially when the story plot itself is complicated and dense which helps the reader to focus and stay on the main lead and what he's going through. Um--isn't that the point. But don't let it deter you from reading one of the best mysteries I've read in a long time with a compelling cast of characters, a well researched and plotted story with lots of great scenes and action, and a hero you won't get enough of. Because by another stroke of chance black luck, Margrave has become the killing floor of not only some people who were bad seeds to begin with, but his own brother, Joe Reacher, a genius mastermind in the highly successful anticounterfeiting unit of the Treasury Department, which has eliminated over 90% of all domestic counterfeiting rings.
Had to be. Too obvious, too creepy Stepford perfect. He makes no apologies for it and I like that Child was able to commit from beginning to end, the nature of this amazing character. So when Jack Reacher saw the local PD come at the diner like hell on wheels, well, they were there for him. So Child's structure is terse, to the point and simple. When he decides to remain, despite the false arrest and all the BS he's getting, Jack Reacher has to stay. And so he goes, a stranger to the world that proves even stranger, and into the wide blue yonder.
Subsidies up the wazoo.
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