2 more Jack Reacher Novels by Lee Child Die Trying and One Shot

Two more Jack Reacher's by Lee Child as I work thru the stack I  scooped at the book sale last fall.  I am fascinated by these featuring that bad ass, Jack Reacher and cannot read them fast enough.  I read Die Trying December thru January, published in 1998, paperback edition has 422 pages.  In this Reacher, ex Army Major, MP is an innocent bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time as seems to happen to this character.   A mysterious  woman is kidnapped and the ransom amount is exorbitant. Reacher happened along and was  taken along for the ride.  Although she urges him to escape and leave her, and doesn't ask for his help,  Reacher will help her. 

 It begins, first paragraph, "Nathan Rubin died because he got brave.  Not the sustained kind of thing that wins you a medal in a war but the split second kind of blurting outrage that gets you killed on the street." and page 2, " Jack Reacher stayed alive because he got cautious.  He got cautious because he heard an echo from his past.  He had a lot of past and the echo was from the worst part of it. He had 13 years in the Army and the only time he was wounded it wasn't with a bullet"   page 3, "He was standing next to a woman.  He was holding her arm.  He had never seen her before.  .....They were in Chicago, Center of the city, a busy sidewalk., a Monday last day of June.  Broad daylight, bright summer sunshine.  ..." 

 Page 50, " He had no problem with how he had gotten grabbed up in the first place, just a freak of chance had put him alongside Holly Johnson at the exact time the snatch was going down.  He was comfortable with that.  He understood freak chances.  Life was built out of freak chances, however much people would like to pretend otherwise."  Their abduction  in the van will take time across the Midwest.  Holly will have military connections too. 

As in all the Reacher novels, there is a lot to learn about topography and observation and usually  details about something I would never have known.  Pages 258-259  detail firing a sniper rifle, from the mechanical engineering of the rifle, optics and geophysics. The novel twists with  unsuspected characters, someone in the FBI is crooked, or is it higher in the military.   Another 5 *****.novel.  

Original copy of One Shot

The second is One Shot, the only Reacher novel to have been made into a movie, and now that I have read several of these and am familiar with the physical description of Jack Reacher, I cannot understand why Tom Cruise would have been cast as the character, he simply does not fit the description, too short, etc.  That is another  discussion.  I recall enjoying the movie but really did not remember much of it and read the book totally unaware of the outcome.  Copyright in 2005, but mass market published in 2012 by Dell, the paperback edition has 466 pages and a prologue into another Reacher novel. 

 It is set in the heartland too, Indiana,  page 1 begins, "Friday, Five o'clock in the afternoon.  Maybe the hardest time to move unobserved through a city.  Or maybe the easiest.  Because at five o'clock on a Friday nobody pays attention to anything except the road ahead."   In this novel Reacher's military background  proves  that all is not as it seems, the shooter is not the one who confesses to the massacre, Jack knows but no one else does.  

Reacher is drawn back into the  back story of James Barr. a former Army sniper who got away with murder in the Army and yet asks for Reacher.  More characters of intrigue, the cop, detective, DA, Helen Rodin who is the defense attorney and also the DA's daughter,  and a reporter, Ann Yanni,  who will become  Reacher's alibi.   

Of interest in this book was the information about boat shoes on page 288, .."boat shoes had been invented by a yachtsman looking for better grip on slippery decks.  The guy had taken a regular smooth soled  athletic shoe and cut tiny stripes into the rubber with a straight razor.  He had experimented and ended up with the cuts lateral and wavy and close together.  The had done the trick, like a miniature tire tread.  A whole new industry had grown up."   Reacher will also have a brief reunification with a former Army fling, Eileen Hutton sent up  from the Pentagon to cover the story  about Barr.  Another 5 *****

New copy of One Shot

UPDATE 2025 JUNE;  Foolishly I did not kept all my copies as I read the novels.  Once Amazon Prime started producing the series  with Jack Richison, a great actor with  dynamic portrayal and physical resemblance to Reacher, I began to wish I had all the novels.  So I began to search book sales but there was a massive interest now in the books, popularity surged.   So I  would pick up any I could find and began to even order new copies from Amazon.  Here is a copy of the newer copy of One Shot that now is on my shelf and will stay.  

2 More by Lee Child Killing Floor and 61 Hours

Trying to catch up yet again on blog books, but my  stack gets ahead of me as this dreary winter at home in the "tundra" and  too early darkness of MN Winters leaves time to read. 

 Both are excellent Jack Reacher novels, both rate 5 *****, both were in the stack I bought at the La Crescent Friends of Library bookstore on sale.

 Killing Floor, published in 1997,  has Jack Reacher traveling through Georgia, but then he stumbles into a hornets nest, is arrested for murder and decides to stick around and solve what will be his brother's killing.  It opens, "I was arrested in Eno's Diner at 12 o'clock.  I was eating eggs and drinking coffee.  A late breakfast, not lunch.  I was wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain.  Alll the way from the highway to the edge of town."Page 16 gives good background on the character, Jack Reacher, " ..I was a military kid...show me a list of military bases around the world and that's a list of where I lived...I did high school in two different countries and I did four years up at West Point....I stayed in the army....Military Police......I'm a 38 year old unemployed ex-military policeman getting called a vagrant by smug civilian bastards who wouldn't last five minutes in the world I survived," 

 This book has fascinating information on the world of counterfeiting and money, composition of paper and how electronic money counters work.   

 Page 310 , Military philosophy, staff college taught him to know the war can only be won when, .."seek out their main force and take it on, destroy it."   Page 367, "He had crashed through the barrier.  He had stopped worrying and started relaxing.  He was up on that plateau where you just did whatever needed doing.  I knew that place. I lived there."  419 pages in this  paperback edition.  Page 62 has advice that anyone can apply to problem solving, "Evaluate.  Long experience had taught me to evaluate and assess.  When the unexpected gets dumped on you don't waste time.  Don't figure out how or why it happened.  Don't  recriminate.  Don't figure out whose fault it is.  Don't work out how to avoid the same mistake next time.  All of that you do later.  If you survive.  First of all you evaluate.  Analyze the situation.  Identify the downside.  Assess the upside.  Plan accordingly.  Do all that and you give yourself a better chance of getting through to the other stuff later."

  61 Hours published in 2010 in the paperback edition is set in  frigid South Dakota in a winter storm where the bus Jack Reacher is riding on crashes. He had accepted a ride on a tour bus of senior citizens .   The novel opens, " Five minutes to three in the afternoon.  Exactly 61 hours before it happened.  The lawyer drove in and parked in the empty lot.....Prison was a binary world.  Either you were locked up or you weren't.  They weren't.  He wasn't." 

The prison provides the primary industry and employment for the town of Bolton and  becomes the center awaiting an assassin who will not come from within but from much farther away.  Stuck in a snowstorm Reacher is drawn into working with the local police who are manipulated as it turns from within by the same long distant assassin'.   He volunteers with their shortage of manpower when the prison sirens sound to body guard the key witness in the state's case, Janet Salter a retired professor.    

 

Back cover 61 Hours

Page 41, " Nothing worthwhile was achieved without reflection and rumination.  With reflection and rumination, impulsive mistakes could be avoided and bold strokes could be formulated." .    

Camel Club and Wish You Well by David Baldacci

July 1, 2011 from my  other blog, copied here .  The other blog was before I set this one up just for books. 


I finished reading a few more books to add to my side bar.  Just last night, I turned the last page 435 on one of my go to author's David Baldacci, an excellent story teller, "The Camel Club."  I have not ever had a disappointing read by him and in this book different yet again, I think he must be meeting with another of my favorite authors, Vince Flynn.  The Camel Club published in 2005 introduces Oliver Stone and his friends who exist on the fringes of Washington, DC to seek the truth about the country's business.  This is a mystery, thriller, terrorist, suspenseful novel at it's best.  Until I read this,  my  favorite Baldacci  read years ago was "Wish You Well."  Now it is a toss up.  Somehow I had jumped sequence because I first read the second in this venue,  which is not a series,  with the same four characters, charter members of the club, Oliver, Caleb Shaw, Reuben Rhodes, and Milton Farb but in this they join forces with Alex Ford, a secret service agent against a sinister plot of terrorists and ideologues that threaten the stability of the nation and the world.  I don't want to ruin the story for anyone, but this twister kept me glued to the pages and in today's topsy turvy  world with  repetitive crises in the Mid east, this work of fiction could be predictive.

Oliver, whose true identity is revealed in this book, claims they chose camel because camels have great stamina and never give up, but Reuben, reveals  page 432",, in the  1920's there was another Camel Club and at each meeting the members raised their glasses to oppose Prohibition to the last drop of whiskey."   As always Baldacci writes well and introduces spectacular characters. Besides the four, there are ever so many more characters such as Djamila,  a Muslim nanny, an Iranian posing as an Egyptian undercover of her peaceful job;  two sided  secret service agents who bring the country to the brink of the unthinkable; the ideologue Muslims who have infiltrated and settled into unsuspecting areas of employment waiting their moment; Brennan, the President of the United States, who is from a small town outside Pittsburgh, PA where terror manifest,  North Koreans, Carter Gray  the US Intelligence Czar appointed by the President  (this book was written before we had Czars...) and more officials and agents.  Camel Club is suspenseful and  kept me guessing to identify who are the villains and who are the champions and that suspense kept me reading.   Pg.154...."..he became Oliver Stone, a man of silent protest who watched and paid attention to important things...."  Pg. 40 describing the issues faced today, ..."not a war of professional armored battalions vs. turbanned rabble in the streets toting rifles and RPGs.  And it was not simply  a difference of religions.  It was a  battle against a mind-set of how people should conduct their lives, a battle that had political, social, and cultural facets melded together  into an exceedingly complex mosaic of humanity under enormous strain."    Pg. 69.."ignorance and intolerance, in pairs, never  one without its evil twin."  Pgs 100-101  well describe the history of the Muslim and  mideast turmoils  from the Syrians, Chechniyans, Mindanos, Kuwait, Lebanon,  Afghanistan, Morocco, Kurds, Iraquis, Baathists, Taliban, Mali and Senegal and more.   Baldacci has  summarized the escalation of problems the world faces today.   I fully recommend this thriller and as I said, I hope it is not predictive.