Killing Floor (Jack Reacher)

A body is found in the antiseptic Georgia town so police do the only thing logical -- arrest the man just off the bus in a rainstorm, there to find out about the blind black blues singer from 60 years ago.

There's the state prison, the rich young ruler, the Harvard-educated policeman, a couple of elderly barbers, and the new guy, who, incidentally, is a West-Point graduate recently of the MP's. And a woman cop.

Things unpeel onion-wise with questions about how the tiny town on the way to nowhere looks like a movie set, how the first and second men were killed, why an apparent suicide-by-hanging was let go at that, why the young guy had been going to work as usual, eighteen months after he'd been fired from his day job.

Break-neck action, slam-bang conclusion, and the only ending reasonably possible.

Right there with your Sam Spades and Lew Archer.

Problem: One ex-military policeman decides to deal with a gang of vicious murdering criminals.

Answer: Kill them all.

Funny with too many bodies left around without apparent consequences. This story stretches credulity.

Lee Child`s creation is brilliant for a series of books, the transient Jack Reacher finds himself in tiny Margrave, Georgia, and is almost immediately arrested, if briefly, as a murder suspect. Imagine his surprise when he discovers that one of the victims is his brother, a brilliant U.S. Treasury agent. Reacher himself is no slouch; a former military policeman, he can dispatch villains with an astonishing array of weapons, including various parts of his body. In the company of a straight-arrow detective and a beautiful lady cop, Reacher soon unearths a conspiracy stretching through the little town and beyond. Blood flows freely, terrible threats are made and carried out, and body parts accumulate. First novelist Child, a former television writer, stretches coincidence outrageously in this would-be noir outing, whose hero is creepily amoral, violent, and generally unpleasant. As a published author myself I`m in awe of Child`s talent.

I just read this book last year and I really liked it.
The first Jack Reacher book I read was The Hard Way, which was O.K.,
but I decided to start at the beginning and work my way forward.
This was a great introduction of this character and I have read
the whole series now, up to and including the new one called
"Nothing to Lose".
The best ones are "Killing Floor", "Tripwire", "Die Trying",
and "Nothing to Lose". The only one I didn't like that much was
"One Shot".