- Shopping Bag ( 0 items )
A former military cop hunts down his brother's killers in this searing tale of revenge and honor. The sleepy, forgotten town of Margrave, Georgia, hasn't seen a crime in decades, but within the span of three days it witnesses crimes that leave everyone stunned. BOMC Alternate. 368 pp. 35,000 print.
They say the past is another country, and in my case it really was: provincial England at the end of the fifties and the start of the sixties, the last gasp of the post-war era, before it surrendered to the tectonic shift sparked by the Beatles. My family was neither rich nor poor, not that either condition had much meaning in a society with not much to buy and not much to lack. We accumulated toys at the rate of two a year: one on our birthdays, and one at Christmas. We had a big table radio (which we called "the wireless") in the dining room, and in the living room we had a black and white fishbowl television, full of glowing tubes, but there were only two channels, and they went off the air at ten in the evening, after playing the National Anthem, for which some families stood up, and sometimes we saw a double bill at the pictures on a Saturday morning, but apart from that we had no entertainment.
So we read books. As it happens I just saw some old research from that era which broke down reading habits by class (as so much was categorized in England at that time) and which showed that fully fifty percent of the middle class regarded reading as their main leisure activity. The figure for skilled workers was twenty-five percent, and even among laborers ten percent turned to books as a primary choice.
Not that we bought them. We used the library. Ours was housed in a leftover WW2 Nissen hut (the British version of a Quonset hut) which sat on a bombed-out lot behind a church. It had a low door and a unique warm, musty, dusty smell, which I think came partly from the worn floorboards and partly from the books themselves, of which there were not very many. I finished with the children's picture books by the time I was four, and had read all the chapter books by the time I was eight, and had read all the grown-up books by the time I was ten.
Not that I was unique - or even very bookish. I was one of the rough kids. We fought and stole and broke windows and walked miles to soccer games, where we fought some more. We were covered in scabs and scars. We had knives in our pockets - but we had books in our pockets too. Even the kids who couldn't read tried very hard to, because we all sensed there was more to life than the gray, pinched, post-war horizons seemed to offer. Traveling farther than we could walk in half a day was out of the question - but we could travel in our heads ... to Australia, Africa, America ... by sea, by air, on horseback, in helicopters, in submarines. Meeting people unlike ourselves was very rare ... but we could meet them on the page. For most of us, reading - and imagining, and dreaming - was as useful as breathing.
My parents were decent, dutiful people, and when my mother realized I had read everything the Nissen hut had to offer - most of it twice - she got me a library card for a bigger place the other side of the canal. I would head over there on a Friday afternoon after school and load up with the maximum allowed - six titles - which would make life bearable and get me through the week. Just. Which sounds ungrateful - my parents were doing their best, no question, but lively, energetic kids needed more than that time and place could offer. Once a year we went and spent a week in a trailer near the sea - no better or worse a vacation than anyone else got, for sure, but usually accompanied by lashing rain and biting cold and absolutely nothing to do.
The only thing that got me through one such week was Von Ryan's Express by David Westheimer. I loved that book. It was a WW2 prisoner-of-war story full of tension and suspense and twists and turns, but its biggest "reveal" was moral rather than physical - what at first looked like collaboration with the enemy turned out to be resistance and escape. I read it over and over that week and never forgot it.
Then almost forty years later, when my own writing career was picking up a head of steam, I got a fan letter signed by a David Westheimer. The handwriting was shaky, as if the guy was old. I wondered, could it be? I wrote back and asked, are you the David Westheimer? Turned out yes, it was. We started a correspondence that lasted until he died. I met him in person at a book signing I did in California, near his home, which gave me a chance to tell him how he had kept me sane in a rain-lashed trailer all those years ago. He said he had had the same kind of experience forty years before that. Now I look forward to writing a fan letter to a new author years from now ... and maybe hearing my books had once meant something special to him or her. Because that's what books do - they dig deeper, they mean more, they stick around forever.
Lee Child is the author of sixteen Jack Reacher thrillers, including the New York Times bestsellers Persuader, The Enemy, One Shot, The Hard Way, and #1 bestsellers Bad Luck and Trouble and Nothing to Lose. His debut, Killing Floor, won both the Anthony and the Barry awards for Best First Mystery, and The Enemy won both the Barry and Nero awards for Best Novel. Foreign rights in the Jack Reacher series have sold in forty territories. All titles have been optioned for major motion pictures.
Killing Floor was an immediate success and launched the series which has grown in sales and impact with every new installment.
Lee has three homes —an apartment in Manhattan, a country house in the south of France, and whatever airplane cabin he happens to be in while traveling between the two. In the US he drives a supercharged Jaguar, which was built in Jaguar's Browns Lane plant, thirty yards from the hospital in which he was born.
Lee spends his spare time reading, listening to music, and watching the Yankees, Aston Villa, or Marseilles soccer. He is married with a grown-up daughter. He is tall and slim, despite an appalling diet and a refusal to exercise.
They say the past is another country, and in my case it really was: provincial England at the end of the fifties and the start of the sixties, the last gasp of the post-war era, before it surrendered to the tectonic shift sparked by the Beatles. My family was neither rich nor poor, not that either condition had much meaning in a society with not much to buy and not much to lack. We accumulated toys at the rate of two a year: one on our birthdays, and one at Christmas. We had a big table radio (which we called "the wireless") in the dining room, and in the living room we had a black and white fishbowl television, full of glowing tubes, but there were only two channels, and they went off the air at ten in the evening, after playing the National Anthem, for which some families stood up, and sometimes we saw a double bill at the pictures on a Saturday morning, but apart from that we had no entertainment.
So we read books. As it happens I just saw some old research from that era which broke down reading habits by class (as so much was categorized in England at that time) and which showed that fully fifty percent of the middle class regarded reading as their main leisure activity. The figure for skilled workers was twenty-five percent, and even among laborers ten percent turned to books as a primary choice.
Not that we bought them. We used the library. Ours was housed in a leftover WW2 Nissen hut (the British version of a Quonset hut) which sat on a bombed-out lot behind a church. It had a low door and a unique warm, musty, dusty smell, which I think came partly from the worn floorboards and partly from the books themselves, of which there were not very many. I finished with the children's picture books by the time I was four, and had read all the chapter books by the time I was eight, and had read all the grown-up books by the time I was ten.
Not that I was unique - or even very bookish. I was one of the rough kids. We fought and stole and broke windows and walked miles to soccer games, where we fought some more. We were covered in scabs and scars. We had knives in our pockets - but we had books in our pockets too. Even the kids who couldn't read tried very hard to, because we all sensed there was more to life than the gray, pinched, post-war horizons seemed to offer. Traveling farther than we could walk in half a day was out of the question - but we could travel in our heads ... to Australia, Africa, America ... by sea, by air, on horseback, in helicopters, in submarines. Meeting people unlike ourselves was very rare ... but we could meet them on the page. For most of us, reading - and imagining, and dreaming - was as useful as breathing.
My parents were decent, dutiful people, and when my mother realized I had read everything the Nissen hut had to offer - most of it twice - she got me a library card for a bigger place the other side of the canal. I would head over there on a Friday afternoon after school and load up with the maximum allowed - six titles - which would make life bearable and get me through the week. Just. Which sounds ungrateful - my parents were doing their best, no question, but lively, energetic kids needed more than that time and place could offer. Once a year we went and spent a week in a trailer near the sea - no better or worse a vacation than anyone else got, for sure, but usually accompanied by lashing rain and biting cold and absolutely nothing to do.
The only thing that got me through one such week was Von Ryan's Express by David Westheimer. I loved that book. It was a WW2 prisoner-of-war story full of tension and suspense and twists and turns, but its biggest "reveal" was moral rather than physical - what at first looked like collaboration with the enemy turned out to be resistance and escape. I read it over and over that week and never forgot it.
Then almost forty years later, when my own writing career was picking up a head of steam, I got a fan letter signed by a David Westheimer. The handwriting was shaky, as if the guy was old. I wondered, could it be? I wrote back and asked, are you the David Westheimer? Turned out yes, it was. We started a correspondence that lasted until he died. I met him in person at a book signing I did in California, near his home, which gave me a chance to tell him how he had kept me sane in a rain-lashed trailer all those years ago. He said he had had the same kind of experience forty years before that. Now I look forward to writing a fan letter to a new author years from now ... and maybe hearing my books had once meant something special to him or her. Because that's what books do - they dig deeper, they mean more, they stick around forever.
The first of this series that I read was Nothing To Lose,,,and ABSOLUTELY fell-flat out- in love! And I knew right then that I would read the whole series. Since then, I've read about 6 of them and Killing Floor was First Rate. All of them are Top Notch,,,hands down. My only fear is that I'll read them all and there will be no more; will be a sad day indeed.
18 out of 18 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.LCH47
Posted September 30, 2010
I Also Recommend:
This is full of fast-paced action, suspense and creative plot twists. Reacher, the hero, has great depth of character that makes his character believable and easy to care about. He stumbles onto a mystery that is multi-layered and complex. There is a lot of brutality, violence that makes the plot intriguing and the book non-put-downable! Compelling!
8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted May 5, 2010
I Also Recommend:
This is my 1st Jack Reacher book and it won't be my last. I am starting with the first one and have already picked up the next two books in the series. This book was a roller coaster ride from the beginning. Reacher gets off a bus and stumbles into a small town looking for information on a musician that lived there years ago. Next thing you know he is in a diner eating when the local police storm in and arrest Reacher for murder. Child develops good characters, a great story, and plenty of twist. A mystery thriller that was hard to put down. Reacher is bad "a" in this story and I can't wait t0o read about his next encounter with trouble.
8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted July 25, 2009
I was sucked into this book for the first two or three chapters. And then very quickly the characters started getting really stale, the plot dragged, and dialogue was amateurish. I'm shocked that this book got a Best First Myster Book Award and was praised highly by so many critics. The most this book does for me is give me the courage that my first novel written will be as good as this or hopefully better. I won't be reading anymore of this series. Jack Reacher just isn't a believable character. Why? Because Lee Child doesn't develop him well enough. I built no connection with Reacher nor any of the other characters.
6 out of 17 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.4thefunofit
Posted July 18, 2009
The Jack Reacher series was recommended to me and after reading the first installment, I will be reading more. Killing Floor captured my attention in the first chapter and kept it throughout. Jack Reacher is a strong, interesting character and I am looking forward to reading more in the series.
5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Kolonel
Posted July 10, 2010
An amazing book for a first novel.
Full of action, much of it semi-believable for the genre. Some things don't compute, like the remarkable deductive ability of the hero. A good read, though. I'll continue with Child.
Incidentally, Amazon has the ebook $2 cheaper than B/N and Apple .
3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Smiley-in-the-Sunshine
Posted May 7, 2010
I Also Recommend:
if you like escapist fiction, this is a good read for lovers of mystery and crime stories- offbeat, funny and sometimes downright cynical, it put me in mind of old-style noir books regarding private eyes with a manic, fresh twist-- Jack Reacher, the main character, is wise and uncomplicated at the same time-- his exploits after this book will greatly appeal to all who grow to care about him and wonder if his extraordinary talents will ever be fully realized as there are hints of depths to come-- yeah for Lee Child: he makes us like Jack, seek to at least minimally understand him, hope for his continued success against the "bad guys" and that he will continue to survive in the face of so many wishing him dead as he inconveniences their criminal enterprise
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.I have read the first two Jack Reacher Novels and I loved them both. The book is about a ex-military police drifter who gets arrested for someone he didnt murder. That is the first chapter of the book and it never stops from there. There is enough action and thrills for everyone in this novel. The only thing I dont like is that in the second novel Die Trying, Lee Child switches to the third person leaving Jack Reacher mysterious instead of being in his mind and hearing his thoughts.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.You will like this novel by Lee Childs. The hero is a likeable guy, who comes across as a guy you want to see succeed, and you know in the back of your mind that he will prevail. Good read, good mystery.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted July 7, 2009
As the first book in the Jack Reacher series, it has me hooked! The main character has a strength and confidence and the suspenseful plot just draws you in.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Joe Reacher is arrested the minute he hits this small town for murder, later to find out that the murdered man is a stunning supprise. He then begins the non stop action. The towns folk begin dying in gruesome ways at a record pace. Joe is a former, highly trained Military Police investigator, and is drawn into the web to find out who and why. It gets messy. This is my first Reacher read, and I am hooked. Very much like James Paterson who I can't get enough of. The twists and turns keep you hopping. It is a fast read you will not want to put it down.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.NICOKN
Posted May 2, 2009
If you like Jack Reacher stories, this is among the best . . . if you are not a fan, you won't like this book. We have Lee Child's next Jack Reacher novel on order because we really enjoy them!
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted January 14, 2012
I have a lot of reading to do with this series, if any of the others books are half as good as this it will be easy reading.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted January 5, 2012
Too many impossible implausable holes.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted December 29, 2011
Great read same type of book he always writes. But worth the time to read, I love tne Reacher series.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted December 28, 2011
I loved it! This was te best book i read in a while
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted December 27, 2011
Love the "Reacher" series.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.MelbaRS
Posted December 25, 2011
With the first Reacher novel I read, Gone Tomorrow, it was a couldn't put down.
I have gone back to the beginning of Lee Child's series. Knowing where Reacher comes from, in this first book, Killing Floor, to his present adventures are riviting.
Can't say enough-- I truly enjoy the whole series.
lill_rose
Posted December 21, 2011
I am through the first 6 chapters and the words "he said" and "i said" are resounding in my head. very badly written novel. the description of people and their surroundings, events are very dull. might finish the novel but will be my fist and last of lee child books
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Show-Me
Posted December 19, 2011
For a first effort, Child establishes himself as an author with potential. His talents are developed and honed in his latter books of the series an you can see Child evolve into a fine mystery writer. He is meticulous in his research and detail that is both interesting and often neglected by some authors.
Having thoroughly enjoyed mystery series with strong characters a la Patterson's Alex Cross and others, Child has hit the jackpot with Jack Reacher: a tought as nails, ex-military MP now drifter with black & white principles in a grey world, who's honor is matched only by his lethal capabilities. Reacher's character is both lovable and intimidating in his unpretentious approach to life...and death.
I have read several in Child's series in no particular order and have found that a start-to-finish sequence isn't necessary though reading "Killing Floor" might be the best place to start from a character establishment point of view. Be warned that both this and his succeeding books will be extremely difficult to put down on the nightstand, particularly in later books where plots shift more frequently as the web is spun.
A good read with a dynamic character and writer who both can be stellarly entertaining for any number of future books.
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Overview
Ex-MP Jack Reacher goes into action to find his brother's killers, after a series of brutal crimes terrorizes tiny Margrave, Georgia, only to uncover the dark and deadly conspiracy concealed behind the town's peaceful facade. A first novel. 50,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo. BOMC Feat Alt.A former military cop hunts down his brother's killers in this searing tale of revenge and honor. The sleepy, forgotten town of Margrave, Georgia, hasn't seen a crime in decades, but within the span of three days it witnesses crimes that leave everyone stunned. BOMC Alternate. 368 pp. 35,000 print.