Killing Floor (Jack Reacher, No. 1)
by Lee Child
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Book Reviews of Killing Floor (Jack Reacher, No. 1)
Book Review: Great debut that falls short with the romance...
Summary: 4 Stars
I was recommended this book by a friend and I picked it up on a whim. I expected a nice mystery and good way to spend my Christmas break. I read into 70 pages and I wasn't bored (some other reviewers claim the first 100 pages or so are dull). I kept reading and then new plot events occur that shoot the story into a new direction. You meet great characters and even have that "thing" inside your mind that automatically knows how to picture the characters and hear how they talk.
The setting is very small and I had a little trouble imagining the actual size of Margrave, Georgia. It says it's 14 miles long, but the way he describes Jack walking from the suburbs to the police department in ten minutes (the suburbs and police department are on opposite ends of the town), I was a little stumped. Maybe I missed something, I dunno.
I'm not going to go in the plot, look to the summary below the book price and figure it out there. If I restate it here, it'll just be filler. Basically, Jack meets Roscoe, this girl who works at the police department. They become romantically involved, almost so much that I really did not care for most of their scenes and ended up in me resenting her. I'm not a fan of romance however, so my opinion might be biased.
The small town is going to be naturally small in population, but good lord does Mr. Child give such a chilling feeling to the town. He continually adds that the town is deserted on Main Street and no one is outside. You literally feel you are the only in the town aside from the characters that are involved in the story. This may be a good or bad thing for some people, but take it as it is.
That's all I can say right now. I enjoyed the book from its start to its epic final showdown. Also, look out for this little word Mr. Child seems to use fanatically: "shrugged". I read a review stating this and it seems it is true. The word is used nearly obsessively and if you nitpick at it like I did, you could really get frustrated. Hopefully you aren't the type of person like I am that gets sidetracked from the story by disbelief of the word being seen, again!
Pick up the book; it's a great start to a series and only gets better from here on out.
Book Review: Decent mystery/thriller, some rookie mistakes
Summary: 3 Stars
This is the first Lee Child book I've read. Well, actually I heard the unabridged audio recording. I like mystery books for long car rides; plenty of action to keep me awake, no serious thinking which is hard to do while concentrating on the road. The reader for the audiobook was excellent. He had a 100 voices, and I was never in doubt as to who was speaking or what character was which.
Killing Floor starts off with action--and a puzzle--right from the start, which was a good beginning and captured my attention right away. The hero, Jack Reacher, is the sort of traditional laconic, hard-boiled type, who finds himself mixed up with super baddies who have to be taken out. Here's some of the rookie mistakes Child made (disclaimer: I've so far read none of his other books). First, one of the main characters has a Harvard PhD in criminology. That's fine as a way to flag "this character is really smart" and set him up as a force to taken seriously. But then Child drops the ball. The Harvard guy (also supposedly a 20 year Boston PD vet) never has any clue as to what to do next, always asks Reacher "what do we do now?", solves none of the puzzles in the story, and even has to think about the difference between singular and plural possessives. Show, don't tell, remember? But we're only told that the character is super smart, and never shown that he is. In fact, he comes across as kind of a dope who sounds like James Earl Jones. Reacher himself is described in terms of repetitive tropes (e.g. he is always shrugging to communicate).
It takes the protagonists a terribly long time to piece the puzzle all together. I saw the basic outline of the solution long before they did, which I shouldn't have. There were also some troubling plot holes--why would one of the Treasury Dept's most senior people personally (and without backup) do a field investigation? After two Treasury agents are murdered, why aren't the Feds swarming like ants all over? I'm sort of willing to suspend disbelief about some of the plot holes, but it could be tighter.
I'll give the series another shot, though. Maybe for another long car trip.
Book Review: An Exciting Stretch
Summary: 2 Stars
"The Killing Floor" clips along like a freight train: fast-paced, but gosh, after a while it all starts to look very familiar. The prose is brisk and simple without much embellishment. The characters are plentiful (nearing a confusing number) and paper-thin. Examples: Hero Jack Reacher is tough as nails, gets the girl, and is definately the toughest, smartest guy in the room (and doesn't mind saying so, repeatedly, and then some more). The heroine is the hottest chick in town, doesn't mind a roll in the hay with our guy Reacher in spite of the fact that she was introduced to him while he was behind bars (presumably because, as she said, he has "kind eyes"), and is generally just along for a vapid ride, not contributing much outside of minds'-eye candy.
The plot has a few twists that you'll see coming a few hundred pages ahead if you've seen any mystery movies in the last 15 years, and a few of the twists are painfully contrived (ie: the identity of the first discovered victim), and some of Reacher's out-of-thin-air deductions. Reacher fancies himself a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, albeit without the plausibility. Another eye-rolling aspect of the book are the constant repititions of things Mr. Child just told us. Every time Reacher and Ms. Eye Candy have sex (which seems to be as often as possible), "...the 3rd world war could have broken out, and the house could have imploded and we wouldn't have noticed..." (Ugh.) Mr. Child evidently didn't have an editor that was brave enough to tell him, "Uh, Lee, you just said that. Three times."
All that said, it's a fast-paced page-turner that provided some decent diversionary reading. I'm hoping that since there have been many Jack Reacher novels published that Mr. Child has honed his craft some (and found himself a better editor). I'm not sure how much "The Killing Floor" affects future Reacher novel plots (I can't imagine that the sparse details of Reacher's past would need review), but I can't whole-heartedly recommend the book due to its shortcomings. Consider starting with book #2.
Book Review: Idiotic
Summary: 1 Stars
In addition to the inanities mentioned by others, let me add a few more:
1. Apparently Child has confused Atlanta with Fairbanks, at least as far as climate goes. Reacher parks a car in a lot at the Atlanta airport with 3 dead bodies in the trunk. As he does so, he muses that the car will be inconspicuous probably for as much as a month. Small problem: It's still warm to hot in Georgia in September, when the car is left. Within a very short time anyone with a sense of smell coming within a hundred yards downwind of the car will know that something is very wrong indeed.
2. Reacher is a dead shot, hitting heads at a hundred feet or more. O.K., he's trained. But then why does he miss killing Picard, one of his most important shots? Yes, Picard is huge. But, short of being the proverbial 800-lb. gorilla, I don't care how large you are. If you're hit anywhere in the chest cavity with a soft-nosed .44 magnum slug, you aren't going to be walking around. And, for that matter, how did Picard get back to Margrave so quickly? He must have called Kliner and had someone pick him up. But then why is he already not part of the crew waiting in the warehouse, along with Teale and Kliner? That is, why does he show up at the last moment?
3. Joe Reacher is said to be smart and (especially) thorough. Then he surely would have done a background check on Kliner, and found that he was a suspect in 8 other murders. (He would have known about Kliner from one of the old professors.) So why did he go tooling up to the warehouse in broad daylight, conveniently giving Kliner the chance to shoot him?
4. The biggest gaff of all: Joe is said to be a Treasury agent. But the U.S. government agency that investigates counterfeiting of U.S. currency is the Secret Service, not the Treasury Department.
These are all the sorts of things that would have been caught by an editor - when publishers had editors.
Book Review: This is NOT the first book you should read from the series.
Summary: 2 Stars
Killing Floor gets 2 stars from me simply because I managed to make it the whole way through.
I have to say - I'm glad this wasn't my first Reacher book - because I wouldn't have picked up another. It's clear that Jack Reacher's character was in early development with this first book. The utter fawning over Roscoe. . . the speed (a week) at which their relationship progressed to a level where they couldn't stand being apart for a couple days. . . the dancing and jumping around by the dumpster. . . these are just samples of many instances where the early Reacher didn't align with the Reacher from later books. I found this Reacher quite difficult to stomach.
And the plot holes! One of the worst was a near psychic conclusion that Reacher came to when time was of the essence and he had to find someone quickly. . . . He called hotel after hotel asking for an alias he practically picked out of a hat, with no signs of doubt that he might be even slightly wrong about the name. And magically, he nailed it. (It's comically more complex than this, but I don't want to ruin the fun.)
There also seemed to be a lot of places in the book where Lee Child hadn't perfected his American voice. I've only heard of bathroom stalls being called "cubicles" in the UK, for instance.
Finally, I'm sure there are opinions on both sides of this issue - but I've decided that I prefer Reacher stories written in 3rd person. I actually miss "Reacher said nothing." And frankly, the way Reacher described things in this book often made me wish he'd said nothing. I'm about to crack the cover on Gone Tomorrow (another first person book) . . . so we'll see if my opinion changes after that.
Bottom line - if you're just getting started with Jack Reacher. . . don't read this book first. The Enemy was where I started. . . and I've read many since then.