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I Read All 24 Jack Reacher Books This Year
In 2019 I read 40 books, pretty evenly split between biographies/history books and non-fiction. Largely because of our tinpot dictator governors shutting down so much other activity this year (sporting events, concerts, restaurants, dances, etc.), I’ve been reading a lot more, and have gone through 56 books in less than eight months, including all 24 of Lee Childs’ Jack Reacher series.
Several months ago, there was a Ricochet post about favorite books and someone mentioned the Jack Reacher series, none of which had I ever bothered to try. I downloaded one from our library (not the first of the series, it had a bunch of people waiting) and whipped through it in about a day and a half. After that I was hooked; most of them took me no more than two days. I wasn’t able to read them in any particular order because of library availability, but I just finished the last one, which ironically is the first in the series, Killing Floor. It has an interesting prologue from the author outlining how he became a writer and his basis for the character.
Jack Reacher is a retired Army military police major and son of a Marine sergeant, and his adventures often involve military or national security themes. He has no fixed address and roams the country by hitchhiking or riding buses while trying to get a feel for the country and its people that he didn’t get to experience as a kid in his Dad’s overseas Marine postings or his own MP activities. The usual theme is Jack minding his own business on a cross-country bus, eating in a diner, walking through New York City or some podunk town in Nebraska or Maine, and lo and behold, crime and adventure find him. It usually involves him going toe-to-toe with a crew of nasty, evil villains while helping out someone who needs to be rescued from the bad guys. Jack is pretty smart, is a numbers freak, and his background in MP investigations serves him well, but at 6-feet-5 and 250 pounds, when the rubber meets the road he has to use brute strength to get him through the tough spots.
In each book, you know what’s going to happen in the end, but the hook is how Jack manages to pull it off. If you like escapist (usually violent) fiction and enjoy trying to match wits with the protagonist, give the books a try. The latest one in the series, Blue Moon, came out in 2019.
P.S. There are several Jack Reacher short stories, too.
Published in Entertainment
I thought the same thing when the first Reacher movie came out – Cruise is short, pretty good looking, brown hair. Also, I’m not really a fan of Cruise.
But he actually did a creditable job of capturing Reacher’s attitude and approach. We ended up enjoying it and the second one. Apparently there will not be a third Cruise/Reacher movie because Lee Child regained the movie rights and he is not a Cruise fan.
I enjoyed the Reacher movie that was partly filmed in Pittsburgh, brought back lots of memories.
The Reacher novels always start strong but then they usually go off the rails into parody. Sad!
Played by Tom Cruz in the movies – who is 5’9″
Daniel Silva’s Allon was good until the last one I read where TDS became evident
One of the interesting things about McDonald was that he had a degree in business, so his plots that involve finance or money scams or pressure on a business owner are very realistic. He wrote a lot of non-McGee books, and when I can catch a bargain in Kindle on those, I grab them. They are out-dated in the sense that the economics and attitudes of the characters fit the 1950s when most of the non-McGee books were written, but the books are all well written.
I agree about the economics. In the fifties you could by a house for about what the monthly payment is now. I some what agree about the attitude of the characters but it was a different era. Life in many ways was much more difficult.McDonald himself had served in WWII and that was still on his mind. Things now taken for granted were not then. I have probably read 30 of the non-McGee books and enjoyed them all.
I just picked up an e-version of one of McDonald’s books, and it has a 3-1/2 page intro written by Lee Child in 2013.
Follow-up: I just finished my first McDonald book, The Quick Red Fox, and am feeling underwhelmed. I know it was written in 1964, but I felt like I was reading some 1940s film noir movie narrated by Humphrey Bogart. It was OK, but the style isn’t one I could really get into. But I will try a couple more to see if it they get better.
You might like the non-McGee books better. There are a lot of them in Kindle form, some quite inexpensive.