Jack Reacher is a walking, talking, 6’5” prescription-strength laxative guaranteed to cause scumbags to soil their skivvies. As hardboiled protagonists go, this guy is loaded with awesome and I was well and truly won over by the end of Lee Child's debut novel.

Reacher’s a former military police officer who is cucumber cool and carries himself with a calm, quiet stoicism that reminded me a lot of Shadow from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods(another favorite character of mine). In typical hardboiled fashion, Jack’s narration of the book’s events is muted and almost detached. This emotionally restrained tone is employed even when he’s describing scenes of grisly, gore filled carnage of which this book has plenty.

He keeps his feelings in check and doesn’t phase easily, even when scummy douchesacks intentionally strive to work themselves under his skin. That said, when the moment is right and Jack is required to muster his inner grim reaper against the human stains who have wronged him and his...man is it ever G-fucking-O time.

This guy can wetwork with the best of them.

PLOT SUMMARY:

Since leaving the army, Jack’s been doing the “Kung Fu” drifter/wanderer act across the U.S. of A. When he arrives at a blip on the map called Margrave, Georgia he finds himself immediately arrested for murder. Seems some gentleman had his head removed with a shotgun blast and Reacher finds himself as the prime suspect.

So after an eventful weekend in prison during which he redecorates the faces and figures of a handful of inmates, Jack is finally released from jail. At this point, the story takes a dramatic “you must suspend your disbelief” turn when the recent murder ends up having a very personal connection to Reacher. Furthermore, the murder seems to be only a tiny part of a massive conspiracy involving the entire town and the body count quickly begins to rise.

Game on.

From here, our giant bag of nut-crushing head-knockery becomes a one man Sherlock Schwarzenegger** and proceeds to hunt clues, piece together evidence and unleash a batch of industrial strength payback on a whole gaggle of bad guys.

**This is early Arnold and not the later model that comes with man boobs.

Game over.

THOUGHTS:

As you can probably glean from the above, I think Jack Reacher is pretty much THE MAN. What I liked most was that as big and strong as he is, this is no simple, brawn-sporting lug with low voltage wiring upstairs. He’s intelligent, shrewd and has a gift for being able to sift through and digest information while thinking on his feet both tactically and strategically. He’s the complete package, A large, clever anti-hero that knows how to get the job done and who has enough humanity inside him to make you want him to come out on top.

However....

Now that I have slobbered all over this review, I do have one major gripe and it is kind of a big’un. Put simply, the writing was painfully bad. The prose is stiffer than rigor mortis and the dialogue was accoutered with more “he saids” and “she saids” than a Hollywood gossip session.

For much of the first half of the book it was almost terminally off putting and greatly distracted me from the story. I thought I had struck out with this book and was not looking forward to doing my review as so many of my friends liked this.

But, as time went on, as the body count increased, as the stakes got higher and as Reacher’s badass quotient approached epic status, I found myself far more forgiving of the simple, “connect the dots” prose and clunky dialogue and realized I had been sucked headlong into the narrative. From then until the wrap up, I was fully on board.

It was like a mini Christmas miracle.

I fell right into the central mystery that was fresh and unique and more than worth the price of admission for me (despite having a few far-fetched plot components). When you add to that my increasingly bromantic bonding to Reacher and his “Billy Jack against the evil townies one man army” show, I was in hardboiled action Gagaville lovin me some story.

And thus….

Overall, a great main character and an interesting central story made up for some less than stellar prose and I ended up firmly liking this tale. I will certainly check out the next tale in this series as I would imagine the writing is only going to get better and the rest should stay at least as good.

3.0 stars. Recommended.