{weekend words}

She looked for less than a second and then accelerated and drove by at sixty, trailing cold air and whirling grit and tyre whine. Reacher watched her go. A good decision, probably. Lone women shouldn’t stop in the middle of nowhere for giant unkempt strangers with duct tape on their faces.

Lee Child (2010)

Worth Dying For

{review} worth dying for

Lee Child Worth Dying For (2010)

Reacher waited for quiet and pumped the gun, a solid crunch-crunch, probably the most intimidating sound in the world. 

Oooh, the ?15th Jack Reacher novel. I wasn't so keen on the last two, but this one is a return to form (at least, I mean, the sort of form I like) with the seemingly immortal Jack Reacher emerging nigh-unscathed from all sorts of completely improbably trouble -- despatching the bad guys, saving the townsfolk (especially the women), fixing his own broken nose with a whack against a wall, and then strolling off into the wide, wide spaces of America.

This one hit the spot like a Reacher punch to the chest:

[He] lay completely still. Not breathing. No visible pulse. No signs of life. The standard first-aid remedies taught by the army medics were artificial respiration and external chest compressions, eighty beats a minute, as long as it took, but Reacher’s personal rule of thumb was never to revive a guy who had just pulled a gun on him. He was fairly inflexible on the matter. 

This particular Reacher book was also funny; almost tongue-in-cheek. I've missed humour in the last few books. It's a nice feeling when a series you've sort of given up on, comes back with a bang.

Rating: 3/5.

If you liked this... you should really start at the beginning. The first couple are awesome.  I've reviewed 61 Hours here.

    

{review} jack's back

Lee Child 61 Hours (2010)

I worry that Jack Reacher is becoming super-humanly indestructible but I've found the whole series quite irresistible despite this little niggle. 61 Hours is another cracker and offers a few new and interesting variations on the legend's progress across the US. No women fall into his bed in this outing; he actually fails to protect his innocent charge; and - cliff-hanger! - does he survive the final explosive denouement? Of course there is another book in the series out already, so I'm guessing, off the top of my head, that the answer is 'yes', but this tactic does shake things up a bit. This outing is just a little bit bleaker than usual. I liked the introduction of a strong female character with the twist that we only meet her down the phone line - will she be back too or was her fate to be only a neat plot device for introducing some more of the younger Reacher? Roll on Jack Reacher.

Rating: 6/10.

If you liked this... go back to the early ones where Reacher's a bit less  of a two-dimensional 'condom stuffed with walnuts' (as Clive James memorably dubbed Arnold Schwarzenegger) and the baddies aren't quite so stereotypical.