Read For Free Killing Floor (Jack Reacher, #1) Imagined By Lee Child Made Available In Paper Copy

far as crimethrillers are concerned, this one was pretty damn good.


As a fan of the Jack Reacher films starring Tom Cruise, Ive had my eager eye on this book series for years.
Thankfully, my library app recently went all out and made available all the ebooks and audiobooks in this longrunning series.
I went borrow crazy and now here we are a new reading addiction has been born,

The book began kind of slowly, but once the unfolding mystery got its hooks into me, there was no looking back.
Never predictable, I enjoyed the plot with all its twists and turns, as well as the full cast of complex characters who were a mix of good and bad and everything inbetween.


The writing itself was kind of off putting at first, simply because it took me a while to get used to Childs specific style, which very much focused on short and deliberate sentences, using very straight forward and simplistic language.


This initial story did a damn good job of introducing Reacher as a formidable hero.
Smart and cunning, he was impressively kickass, yet he appeared on a very human level, showing very realistic and grounded qualities to his character that are so often missing in many seemingly infallible fictional action heroes of this kind.


Beyond all the badassery, Reacher was also a good man, proving honest, intelligent, and amusingly witty at every turn.
I simply liked the guy and I have no trouble imagining myself delving further with this series when the time is right.
I disliked this novel, maybe because I'm missing a Y chromosome, First, the style of the prose and voice of the first person narrator, Jack Reacher, really irked me.
The style reminded me of irritatingly faux Hemingway, Spare, choppy with lots of short declarative sentences and sentence fragments, Here's a sample paragraph from fairly early on that's typical:

I stayed leaning up on the bars, motionless.
Baker signaled Hubble to walk with him around the far side of the squad room, Toward the rosewood office in back, As Hubble rounded the end of the reception desk, I saw his feet, Tan boat shoes. No socks. The two men walked out of sight into the office, The door closed. The desk sergeant left his post and went outside to part Baker's cruiser,

It's pretty much all like thatunvarying and that style doesn't wear well, Imagery Great description Actual sentence: It was about as distinctive as the most distinctive thing you could ever think of.


The other problem I had with the voice and character was that, as the blurb from Jeffrey Deaver put it, Jack Reacher is one of those "tough guy heroes.
" The kind that has not a trace of a sense of humor and all the affect of a Vulcan purged of all emotion at Gol.
The kind of guy that has the first pretty woman in view have the hots for him and sleep with him within two days of meeting him almost all of which he spent in jail even though she's a police officer who met him when taking his prints, he's been living like a vagrant and he's a murder suspect.
The kind who kills with his own hands without a ripple of remorse or queasiness, And the violent streak got worse as the novel went alongat first it was justifiable self defense, even if ruthless and brutal.
In an early encounter Reacher gouges out an eye, But it eventually became Mike Hammerlike coldblooded murdersonly justifiable to fans of Death Wish,

The part I did like was that Reacher is a former military policeman who has a Sherlock Holmes touch about him at times.
Such as when he dazzles Detective Finley with deductions about his background, Except, please, there's no such thing as "Harvard tones, " There's a Boston accent among natives of the area, but that's different, Child supposedly has a British background, so maybe superimposing Oxford in his mind unto Harvard explains that piece of bizarreness.
It was also entertaining how even when he had been arrested for murder and was being questioned, Reacher was treating Finley more like a colleague investigating the murder with him than his interrogator.
That had a kind of cool about it I appreciated in the beginning,

But coincidences pile up two brothers who haven't met in years cross paths by chance in a small Georgia town they had never before visited even though one is based in D.
C. and the other is a drifter crisscrossing the country, plot holes yawn as wide as canyons a treasury agent is investigating a case that threatens the United States economy he's reported killed and it's ignored by the Feds, implausibilities stack Reacher, a West Point graduate who reached the rank of major byhas been involuntarily demobilized out of the army because of budget cuts and as mentioned above, Reacher begins to kill in a way that would make Rambo proud, giving me testosterone poisoning.
So, unless someone tells me this series or author got way, way better, this will be my last Lee Child novel.
Hell, to be honest, after this experience no matter what anyone tells me this will be my last Lee Child novel.
On the Flintstones, whenever there was an indoor chase scene, the background in the house never varied, it would be the same window, table, lamp running repeatedly behind the action, and the chase would go on seemingly forever a veritable cartoon mile/.
kilometers. Watching the show as a kid, it was almost more than my sugarfueled addled brain could handle.


Reading this book was the same type of existentially empty experience, Grafting a promising storyline onto a series of humorless, mindnumbing hackneyed plot devices, punctuated by the occasional instances of brutal violence, and you end up with literary inertia, which appears to be going somewhere, but its not.
Just like Fred and Dino,

The book has an introduction by the author that had been added for the Tiny Tom movie release.
The introduction details Lee Childs life from quitting his day job to how he created Reacher, The introduction was the highlight of this reading experience, Child probably had a lot of ideas bouncing around in his head when he began writing this book.
Sadly, he picked the wrong ones, A quote he repeats in the intro is, "Dickens wanted what the audience wanted", Sure, but Dickens was his own man, who didn't pander to his audience's fleeting whims,

I dont want to totally dismiss the Reacher series out of hand, The Almighty Stephen King pimps it on the cover of this edition and Ive read one other Reacher book and it was fairly entertaining.
Even though Ive overinvestedcents in two other volumes, itll be awhile before I give my time to another book in this series.

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