The Nature of Things

Lee Child is now up to number 23 in his Jack Reacher saga. I've previously read four of the books, the first three plus number 14. I'm never going to read the other eighteen in order to get to Past Tense , so I've utterly given up on my rule of reading series books in order. Life is too short. But I'd heard some good things about this latest one and I needed a non-demanding read as a palate cleanser so I decided to go with it. As in all the books (I guess), we find Jack Reacher on the road and on the move. This time he's starting out in Maine and his destination is San Diego, but on a whim, he decides to go through Laconia, New Hampshire. The town was where his father was born and grew up and he's never seen it. He researches the town records, with help from a city employee, to find where the Reachers might have lived and heads out to find the site and walk the ground where his forebears lived. Meantime, in another part of the county, a young Canadian couple is ...

Continuing with my Summer of Reading Mysteries, I picked up a Jack Reacher novel. As one who is dedicated to reading series books in order, I thought I was doing that, reading the fourth book in the series. Turns out this is actually the fourteenth book. Oops! Oh, well. It didn't really seem to matter. The plot of this one did not depend on having read previous books. In fact, Lee Child managed to reprise information about Reacher's past and why he's on the road as a part of the plot, so no harm, no foul. Reacher has paid the driver of a tour bus, out of Seattle, to come aboard with a church group of elderly citizens who have unaccountably decided to visit South Dakota in the dead of winter. That fact alone may be the most far-fetched part of this plot. Before they can reach their destination, their bus swerves to miss a car in a fierce blizzard outside the little town of Bolton, and leaves the road, ending up in a ditch. There is no other traffic and no help in sight. In ...

Tripwire by Lee Child My rating: 3 of 5 stars I needed an antidote to the news of the day. In a world where political leaders and their apologists on the right straight-facedly justify the use of torture and where policemen are not held accountable for killing unarmed citizens, it seems that justice is as rare as unicorns. I wanted to visit a world where bad guys are actually punished for their bad deeds. A Jack Reacher novel seemed like an appropriate choice. I had read the first two Reacher novels ( Killing Floor and Die Trying ) and wasn't all that impressed, but at least I felt sure that in Reacherworld evil would not triumph. So I dipped into Lee Child's third offering in the series. We meet Reacher in Key West, digging swimming pools by hand and building up his already prodigious muscles. He has this job, plus a second one as bouncer at a club, because he's low on cash and needs some ready money. Things have been going along swimmingly, so to speak, for three months...

My rating: 4 of 5 stars Die Trying is the second in Lee Child's blood-spattered thriller series featuring his superman Jack Reacher. In this entry in the series a lot of the bloodletting is done by the bad guys rather than by Reacher. And they are very bad guys indeed. Reacher becomes involved in this adventure while innocently walking down a street in Chicago. He encounters a young woman coming out of a dry cleaner's shop with several outfits in one of her arms and an aluminum crutch in the other arm. She is struggling to manage the door, the crutch, and the clothes and drops the crutch. Reacher stops to help and as he returns her crutch to her, the two find themselves confronted by two armed men. By the curb is a car with a third man as driver. They are forced into the car by the men, the victims of a broad daylight kidnapping. The two are then transferred into a paneled van and a long trip across country begins. Since the van is closed, they have no idea which way they are ...

My rating: 3 of 5 stars People have been telling me for years that I should read the Jack Reacher series, but I always resisted. One of my Mystery Book Club friends in particular is Reacher's biggest fan and is always proselytizing for the Lee Child series and to have him added to our reading list. She likes her mysteries to be full of blood and guts - the bloodier the better. After reading this first in the Reacher series, I guess I can see why she's such a big fan. Thinking back over what I've just read, I count thirteen men that Reacher killed over the course of the few days when the action of Killing Floor takes place. I may have missed one or two. When the blood flows so freely, it is really hard to keep track. Of course, they were all truly evil men with no redeeming value to society. But still - thirteen! The story here, briefly, is that Jack Reacher, six months removed from his Army career, is wandering around the country and has just landed in Margrave, Georgia, a...