I’ve been enjoying the Jack Reacher novels for years now. There are few other mysteries writers that I’ve been able to enjoy for more than five years or so. Given that mysteries often follow formulae, it’s incredibly hard to be original, to do something new. While I can’t exactly say that Lee Child does something new every time, he always manages to come up with a mystery that I can’t solve until the main characters does. Child even usually manages to get me to bark up the same wrong trees as Reacher.
The other thing I really like about this books is that the character is a modern day Sherlock Holmes, in some senses. He observes and he has a lot of experience drawing conclusions from his observations. But, unlike the great Holmes, he never gives me the sense that it’s all elementary and that you’re a moron if you can’t see what’s going on.
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| Bad Luck and Trouble |
Bad Luck and Trouble is the latest Reacher book, and finds this character still wandering around the country, being a tourist in the United States. Child pulls the plot out of Reacher’s growing back story, and comes up with a pretty good mystery. I enjoyed it so much, that I’ve gone back to the first book and I have to say that Reacher has matured a lot over the last eleven books. He was downright boyish in Killing Floor. I’m not sure how long Child can keep spinning Reacher’s story out until he hits a Jessica Fletcher-like wall, where it starts to seem really weird that every where he goes, someone dies and he has to find out why. Hopefully, Child keeps Reacher a dynamic, evolving character. There are so few detective characters out there who use little more than their brains and their eyes to solve crimes.