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Tripwire (A Jack Reacher Novel)

Lee Child

Ex-military policemen Jack Reacher is lying low in Key West, digging up swimming pools by hand. He is not best pleased when a private detective starts asking questions about him, but when the detective, Costello, turns up dead with his fingertips sliced off, Reacher realises it is time to move on. Soon (as in Child's two previous excellent thrillers Die Trying and Killing Floor) Reacher is up to his neck in lethal trouble involving a vicious Wall Street manipulator, a mysterious woman (of course) and the livelihood of a whole community. Even the fate of soldiers missing in action in Vietnam is stirred into the brew. But this is not a book by one of the new breed of US thriller writers: Child prides himself that, as an Englishman, he writes American thrillers that are utterly convincing in milieu and toughness of action, without a trace of English sensibility. This new one is no exception-- every bit as lean and compulsive as its predecessors, it also builds on the freshest aspect of those books: Reacher may be a tough, epic hero, but he always remains human and vulnerable. Here's one for that long plane or train journey.
--Barry Forshaw
Killing Floor

Lee Child
Persuader

Lee Child

Breakneck in its pace, uncompromising in its narrative ruthlessness, Persuader is typical of Lee Child's Jack Reacher adventures. After a first chapter that misdirects the reader quite staggeringly, ex-army freelance adventurer Reacher is apparently on the run. As always with Child and Reacher, what we see at first is only a small part of the complex plotting lying underneath. Reacher has his own reasons for taking on this case, reasons that are very personal and go back a decade. Being Reacher, tough with a heart of gold, his emotions--his liking for a drug dealer's wife and son, his more than professional interest in the DEA officer investigating them, his dislike of steroid-crazed thug Paulie--soon complicate his objectives. Childs is endlessly reliable on gadgets--the miniaturised e-mail senders, the big guns--and on action sequences--various fights and a swim in a riptide; he also makes us believe in complex emotions and deeper feelings than a love of violence. This is not one of the best of the Reacher books--it has too many flashbacks and a shadowy villain--but like all of them it is an action thriller for intelligent readers. --Roz Kaveney
Echo Burning (A Jack Reacher novel)

Lee Child

There was a time when a US-set crime novel by a British writer (such as James Hadley Chase's No Orchids For Miss Blandish) could get away with a certain carelessness in local detail. Not any more. Since the Englishman Lee Child began writing his superbly authentic novels, few readers on either side of the Atlantic would accept anything other than the gritty authenticity of books such as Child's latest, Echo Burning. He prides himself on the plausibility of his settings and characters, and actually has a more striking sense of the American landscape that many native writers. He never allows the reader to forget just where his hero Jack Reacher is, what he's feeling, smelling, seeing. And Reacher has slowly but surely become one of the most fully rounded protagonists in thriller fiction. It's hardly surprising that the novels have been optioned for filming; what is surprising is the fact that it hasn't happened before.
Jack finds himself suffering the intense heat of a Texas summer, and (leaving behind a messy situation) hardly worries about the dangers of who will pick him up when he hitches a ride. But it's a beautiful young rich girl driving a Cadillac who gives Jack a lift. Carmen tells him she has a little girl who is being observed by unseen and sinister forces. And her brutal, abusive jailed husband is more than likely to kill her when he gets out. It's obviously highly inadvisable for Jack to travel to Carmen's remote ranch in Echo County and become involved in her problems, but (needless to say) he does just that. And he's soon encountering lies, lust and prejudice, with untrustworthy cops and lawyers absolutely no help. Jack finally realises that there is only one way to resolve this lethal situation.
As always with Child, the narrative rattles along with real élan, and the sultry characterisation keeps everything ruthlessly on track. --Barry Forshaw
Die Trying

Lee Child
Without Fail (A Jack Reacher novel)

Lee Child

Lee Child has inexorably pulled himself into the upper echelons of thriller writing with a series of tough, lean and perfectly crafted novels featuring ex-US military cop Jack Reacher. Without Fail is the sixth outing for the resourceful Reacher, and far from showing any signs of incipient fatigue, the series just goes from strength to strength as Child hones his abilities.
As in such previous books as Die Trying and The Killing Floor, Jack Reacher is a maverick. He carries no ID, and any place he hangs his hat is home. And while he's more than capable of dealing out massive violence to the bad guys who take him on, he's a sucker for a plea for help--particularly from a woman. This time, he's asked by the persuasive Ms Froelich to help her protect the Vice-President of the United States from an assassination attempt that's on the cards. So Reacher, with only the clothes he stands up in, finds himself deep in the rarefied world of the United States Secret Service in Washington, where his problems come from the stiff-necked bureaucrats as much as from the utterly ruthless killer who soon has Reacher in his sights as much as the Vice-President.
If the plot here is a tad reminiscent of the Clint Eastwood movie In the Line of Fire, that's no coincidence--Child has his characters discuss the echoes of their situation with that film at length. But, boy, does Child ring some powerful variations of his own on the theme: this the most kinetic Reacher novel yet, full of the brilliantly orchestrated set-pieces that are a specialité de la maison with the author (the final climax in a snowy ravine is a pip). The action here is relentless, but never at the expense of character--Child is canny enough to keep dark shadows from Reacher's past a key part of his motivation. And the skill that the British-born Child is so proud of--his faultless evocation of the American landscape--is the final icing on a very tempting cake. --Barry Forshaw
The Enemy

Lee Child

Lee Child is a quiet, undemonstrative man who is phlegmatic about his success in the thriller field. The Enemy will no doubt attract the usual enthusiastic acclaim, and it deserves to. One thing that is guaranteed to please Child is the open-mouthed astonishment of American readers who learn that this writer of the most idiomatic American thrillers (with brilliantly realised US locales) is actually English. But there's never a sense of striving for effects in such taut Child novels as Killing Floor and Die Trying. Child simply delivers the goods, US-style--and The Enemy is no exception.
Child's usual protagonist, the tough and resourceful Jack Reacher, is in North Carolina on New Year's Day, 1990. Elsewhere, world-shaking events are underway, such as the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. But Jack's job as a Military Police Duty Officer has him concerned with what initially seem to be less significant happenings: a soldier has been found dead in a sleazy motel and when Jack goes to the house of the soldier (a two-star general) to inform his wife, he finds her also dead. Needless to say, events in another part of the globe are having fatal repercussions in the US, and Reacher is soon up to his neck, with the body count rising.
As a glimpse into the early life of Jack Reacher (now securely one of the most admired heroes in contemporary thriller writing), this is meat and drink to the Child aficionado. Child foregrounds characterisation in his pacy narratives, and this eighth outing for Jack has all the adrenalin-producing qualities of its predecessors. --Barry Forshaw
Bad Luck and Trouble

Lee Child
The Visitor (A Jack Reacher Novel)

Lee Child

Before Lee Child's Jack Reacher became a wanderer, stumbling into desperate situations and sorting them out with his two fists and sharp brain, he used his skill for the US Army's military police. When he is accused of a series of killings--women who left the army after sexual harassment proceedings found with their hearts stopped in baths full of camouflage paint--he has to use his skills to clear his name, and to do the Army and FBI's work for them. The near-impossible perfection of Reacher's physique and brain are met here by a puzzle that almost meets the same standard of perfection--the reason he is suspected is simply that perfect detectives are handy patsies for perfect murders, and Reacher is, besides, a man whom those in authority find making them itch...
"As a rule, the Bureau and the military don't get along too well."
"Well, there's a big surprise. Who the hell do you guys gel along with."
..."You know how it is. Military hates the Bureau, the Bureau hates CIA, everybody hates everybody else...So we need a go-between."
Reacher shrugged.
"I don't know anybody like that. I've been out too long."
Lee Child's remorselessly perverse ingenuity is working overtime in this, his fourth book, though like most great puzzles or tricks, his secrets depend a little heavily on mere misdirection. A book this driven by the central character's laconic aggression ought not to be quite as smart as this is, or quite as likeable--Lee Child's clever formula is to make that paradox work. --Roz Kaveney
One Shot

Lee Child

Lee Child's Jack Reacher thrillers always have remarkably inventive setups, and One Shot is true to form. A sniper, Barr, kills five people with six shots and leaves a clear trail of evidence; arrested, he asks for Reacher. When Reacher was a military policeman, politics stopped him pursuing Barr--he cannot understand why Barr would ask for him and Barr has been beaten in jail until he cannot remember himself. Yet, for Reacher, the loner who looks at things differently from civilians, the story does not add up--Barr should not have got himself caught, should not even have fired from where he did.
Child is a master of the perverse solution to the set of questions no-one ever asked in quite that way before, and the macho yet sensitive Reacher is one of the more interesting series characters in thrillers. One Shot is a smart set of puzzles which strings the reader along to false conclusions and a sense of real danger. It also, like its hero, has a heart. --Roz Kaveney
Nothing to Lose

Lee Child
The Hard Way

Lee Child

The `surprise' factor when reading the thrillers of Lee Child has, it must be admitted, vanished. Most readers who pick up the new book, The Hard Way, will be well aware that this extremely American narrative is, in fact, written by an Englishman. The days when early readers of Child (notably his American fans) would exclaim how amazing it was that Child got all the cultural reference points correct are long gone. And, in a way, that's not a bad thing--now we can judge the novels purely on their own terms. And if The Hard Way doesn't initially appear to be quite as impressive as its predecessors, that's not to say that it isn't a supremely assured piece of work.
Child's durable hero is, of course, ex-soldier Jack Reacher. Child's publishers claim 'men want to be him--women want to have him', and there's no denying that's a considerable part of Reacher's appeal. His footloose lifestyle and handy way with the trouble that he's always encountering are handled by Child with great panache. In some ways, Reacher is the perfect existential hero: he owns nothing or no-one, and he is, in his turn, owned by nothing or no one. He is defined by the actions he undertakes--and that definition only lasts as long as the problem he is involved with. This one has an even wider range than usual, starting on a busy New York thoroughfare and moving to a violent finale across the Atlantic in the sylvan depths of the English countryside, with Jack up against some very dangerous opponents. Interestingly, Child's publishers describe Jack Reacher in this novel as `invincible', and (ironically) they put their finger on an interesting point in this latest entry. While Jack has always been supremely capable, earlier books have always had a genuine sense of danger--how the hell would Jack get himself out of the latest lethal situation? Here, the outcome seems less in doubt. But this is a minor quibble--Child could not write a bad book if he tried, and all the narrative momentum that propelled the earlier Reacher adventures is satisfyingly in evidence in his latest outing.
--Barry Forshaw
Gone Tomorrow

Lee Child
Nothing to Lose

Lee Child
Killer Year (MIRA) (MIRA)
Running Blind (Jack Reacher Novels)

Lee Child

Before Lee Child's Jack Reacher became a wanderer, stumbling into desperate situations and sorting them out with his two fists and sharp brain, he used his skill for the US Army's military police. When he is accused of a series of killings--women who left the army after sexual harassment proceedings found with their hearts stopped in baths full of camouflage paint--he has to use his skills to clear his name, and to do the Army and FBI's work for them. The near-impossible perfection of Reacher's physique and brain are met here by a puzzle that almost meets the same standard of perfection--the reason he is suspected is simply that perfect detectives are handy patsies for perfect murders, and Reacher is, besides, a man whom those in authority find making them itch...
"As a rule, the Bureau and the military don't get along too well."
"Well, there's a big surprise. Who the hell do you guys gel along with."
..."You know how it is. Military hates the Bureau, the Bureau hates CIA, everybody hates everybody else...So we need a go-between."
Reacher shrugged.
"I don't know anybody like that. I've been out too long."
Lee Child's remorselessly perverse ingenuity is working overtime in this, his fourth book, though like most great puzzles or tricks, his secrets depend a little heavily on mere misdirection. A book this driven by the central character's laconic aggression ought not to be quite as smart as this is, or quite as likeable--Lee Child's clever formula is to make that paradox work. --Roz Kaveney
Killer Year (MIRA) (MIRA)
Bad Luck and Trouble

Lee Child
Nothing to Lose

Lee Child
Persuader

Lee Child

Breakneck in its pace, uncompromising in its narrative ruthlessness, Persuader is typical of Lee Child's Jack Reacher adventures. After a first chapter that misdirects the reader quite staggeringly, ex-army freelance adventurer Reacher is apparently on the run. As always with Child and Reacher, what we see at first is only a small part of the complex plotting lying underneath. Reacher has his own reasons for taking on this case, reasons that are very personal and go back a decade. Being Reacher, tough with a heart of gold, his emotions--his liking for a drug dealer's wife and son, his more than professional interest in the DEA officer investigating them, his dislike of steroid-crazed thug Paulie--soon complicate his objectives. Childs is endlessly reliable on gadgets--the miniaturised e-mail senders, the big guns--and on action sequences--various fights and a swim in a riptide; he also makes us believe in complex emotions and deeper feelings than a love of violence. This is not one of the best of the Reacher books--it has too many flashbacks and a shadowy villain--but like all of them it is an action thriller for intelligent readers. --Roz Kaveney