Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Jack Reacher - An absolute phenomenon!


I’m absolutely smitten by Jack Reacher and by its creator Lee Child, and this is more of a tribute to them than a normal review!
I’m a voracious reader, and my average is a book each week at the least. If you’ve been to The Review Site before, you would already have realized that – with the series of reviews on Kindle and all. However, this is the first review of a book directly, and I have no doubt that a lot of them will follow.
Lee Child (the pen name of British writer Jim Grant) created Reacher in 1997, and since then, there have been 14 books in the series, and each one of them is a thumping good read! If you are an aficionado of mysteries and thrillers, you will absolutely love the ride each book in the series takes you on.
Jack Reacher is an ex-military policeman and he consciously wanders across the country with nothing but a foldable toothbrush in his pocket! That in itself would be the fantasy of many people :)
To date, I’ve read Die Trying, Echo Burning, Without Fail, The Persuader, The Enemy, Bad Luck and Trouble, and Nothing to Lose. Each of these books ranks with the absolute best mysteries I’ve ever read – probably just below ‘Shall we Tell the President’ (which is my all time favorite thriller), and each book has kept me awake late into the nights! Caused my boss to look more than once at my red eyes and wonder what I was doing nights ;)
The beauty of the books is the taut way the author holds us and doesn’t let go right up to the end. What is even more amazing is that some of the books are in first person and some in third person narrative. It is quite difficult to manage to hook the readers using a single narrative, and Lee Child is a master at both these forms! Kudos.
The sad thing is that my local bookstore ran out of Lee Child titles – I’ve finished everything they’ve got. Hope they get in the rest real fast!
I’ve consciously not spoken about the plots in any of these books. You should pick up atleast one title from the series and read it. The rest will automatically follow! And i’m yet to meet a fiction fan who has not loved Lee Child and Jack Reacher!

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