Finished 11-21-09, rating 4/5, mystery, pub. 1997

Jack Reacher series, book 1

They had come prepared.  They’d known there was going to be a lot of blood.  They’d brought overshoes.  They must have brought overalls.  Like the nylon bodysuits they wear in the slaughterhouse.  On the killing floor.

Chapter 12

Jack Reacher is an ex-military cop who is roaming the United States, seeing the country he barely knows after a lifetime (36 years) spent on military bases around the world.  A random memory of a story that his brother told him makes him step off the Greyhound bus and walk 14 miles to the small, pristine town of Margrave, Georgia.  As he is having breakfast at the diner he is arrested for the murder of two bodies found while he was on the road.  And this is where the fun begins.

Jack has an alibi, but that will not save him from dangerous time in prison or from people trying to frame him.  He does get some help from new friends, but he will have to rely on his own considerable skills to get him out of this mess.  And Jack is more than able to take care of himself.

I love graphic, gritty, and grisly mysteries.  I wouldn’t want to read a steady diet of them, but occasionally that’s all that will fit the bill.  This one fits all of those descriptors and a few more.  It is an amazing debut novel from Lee Child, it even won a few mystery awards when it was first published. 

I really liked this book and it can be read as a stand-alone novel.  There is nothing left hanging that will make you finish the series unless you need more of Jack Reacher.  And for me, Jack is not a guy I fell in love with.  He’s a hard man and while some of the book may have had too much detail, there was too little time spent addressing Jack’s sense of right and wrong.  So, I was left feeling a little uneasy about him. 

I liked this book and if you like the Jason Bourne type character then I think you will like this one.  I will read the next in the series to see the growth of Child and Reacher from book one to book two. 

This was a library book.