4.4
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70,573 ratings
THE FIRST NOVEL IN LEE CHILD'S #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING JACK REACHER SERIES—NOW AN ORIGINAL SERIES ON PRIME VIDEO!
“From its jolting opening scene to its fiery final confrontation, Killing Floor is irresistible.”—People
Ex-military policeman Jack Reacher is a drifter. He’s just passing through Margrave, Georgia, and in less than an hour, he’s arrested for murder. Not much of a welcome. All Reacher knows is that he didn’t kill anybody. At least not here. Not lately. But he doesn’t stand a chance of convincing anyone. Not in Margrave, Georgia. Not a chance in hell.
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ISBN-10
0593440633
ISBN-13
978-0593440636
Print length
496 pages
Language
English
Publisher
Berkley
Publication date
December 27, 2021
Dimensions
5.43 x 1.04 x 8.19 inches
Item weight
12.8 ounces
Second conclusion: If you can see a bandwagon, it’s too late to get on.
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I had to decide how to use that pressure. I had to decide whether it was going to crush me or turn me into a diamond.
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Further On Up the Road. Bobby Bland sings it in G major.
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Praise for Killing Floor
“All [Jack Reacher novels] are ripping yarns, but.... Killing Floor wins awards for Best Corrupt Southern Town in a Summer Novel and Best Exploding Warehouse.”—Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly
“Combines high suspense with almost nonstop action. Reacher is a wonderfully epic hero: tough, taciturn, yet vulnerable.”—People
“Great style and careful plotting. The violence is brutal… depicted with the kind of detail that builds dread and suspense.”—The New York Times
“A complex thriller with layer upon layer of mystery and violence and intrigue…A long unsettling trip that leaves your brain buzzing and your stomach knotted. The author pens nightmarish images as casually as an ordinary writer would dot an ‘i’ or cross a ‘t’.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A tough, compelling thriller with characters who jump off the page.”—Houston Chronicle
“Violent and visceral…A cut above…Reacher is as tough as he is resourceful. An exciting, edge-of-the-chair account. Compelling and relentlessly suspenseful.”—The Denver Post
“Some novelists can write top-notch action and some can create compelling mysteries, yet it’s rare to find both of those skills displayed in a single book. Lee Child’s Killing Floor is one of them. But not content with writing a rip-roaring thriller, Child also gives us one of the truly memorable tough-guy heroes in recent fiction: Jack Reacher.”—Jeffery Deaver
“A big, rangy plot, menace as palpable as a ticking bomb, and enough battered corpses to make an undertaker grin.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Beautifully detailed action scenes and fascinating arcana about currency and counterfeiting…[A] taut and tough-minded first novel.”—Publishers Weekly
“I love the larger-than-life hero, Jack Reacher. I grew up a fan of John Wayne’s and Clint Eastwood’s movies, and it’s great to see a man of their stature back in business. Lee Child grabs you with the first line and never loosens his grip. Killing Floor is a terrific ride.”—Nevada Barr
“This is a kick-ass first novel by the very talented Lee Child. Hero Jack Reacher has presence and dimension—a man you definitely want on your side. Child has a sure touch and a strong voice. Definitely a talent to watch.”—Lynn S. Hightower
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KILLING FLOOR
Special excerpt from Die Trying
INTRODUCTION
Jack Reacher made his first appearance in print on March 17, 1997—St. Patrick’s Day—when Putnam published Killing Floor in the United States, which was Reacher’s—and my—debut. But I can trace his, and the book’s, genesis backward at least to New Year’s Eve 1988. Back then I worked for a commercial television station in Manchester, England. I was eleven years into a career as a presentation director, which was a little like an air traffic controller for the network airwaves. In February 1988, the UK commercial network had started twenty-four-hour broadcasting. For a year before that, management had been talking about how to man the new expanded commitment. None of us really wanted to work nights. Management didn’t really want to hire extra people. End of story. Stalemate. Impasse. What broke it was the offer of a huge raise. We took it, and by New Year’s Eve we were ten fat and happy months into the new contract. I went to a party, but didn’t feel much like celebrating. Not that I wasn’t content in the short term—I sleep better by day than night, and I like being up and about when the world is quiet and lonely, and for sure I was having a ball with the new salary. But I knew in my bones that management resented the raise, and I knew that the new contract was in fact the beginning of the end. Sooner or later, we would all be fired in revenge. I felt it was only a matter of time. Nobody agreed with me, except one woman. At the party, in a quiet moment, she asked me, “What are you going to do when this is all over?”
I said, “I’m going to write books.”
Why that answer? And why then?
I had always been an insatiable reader. All genres, all the time, but very unstructured. I naturally gravitated toward crime, adventure, and thrillers, but for a long time in the UK we lacked genre stores and fan magazines, and of course the Internet hadn’t started yet, so there was no effective network capable of leading a reader from one thing to the next. As a result, I had come across some very obscure stuff, while being completely ignorant of many major figures. For instance, in February 1988—while the ink was still drying on our new TV contracts—I took a vacation in the Yucatán. I flew back via Miami, and picked up John D. MacDonald’s The Lonely Silver Rain at the bookstall in the airport. I had never heard of MacDonald or Travis McGee. I read the book on the plane back to London and loved it. I thought, “I wonder if it’s part of a series?” Hah! I was back in the States at Easter that year and bought every McGee title I could find, which added up to about a linear yard’s worth.
Nobody needs me to sing MacDonald’s praises, but that yard of books did more for me than provide excellent entertainment. For some reason the McGee books spoke to me like textbooks. I felt I could see what MacDonald was doing, and why, and how, as if I could see the skeleton beneath the skin. I read them all that summer, and by New Year’s Eve I was completely sure that when the ax fell, I wanted to do what MacDonald had done. I could stay in the entertainment business, but work for myself in the world of books.
It took six years for the ax to fall. But fall it did, and so it came time to make good on that earlier ambition. I went to WHSmith’s store in the Manchester Arndale mall—which the IRA destroyed a year later—and bought three legal pads, a pencil, a pencil sharpener, and an eraser. The bill was a penny under four pounds, which was about six bucks at the time. Then I sat down with my purchases and let years of half-formed thoughts take shape. But not just six years of thoughts—now I have to take the process back another thirty years or so, to the point when my reading habit first took hold.
I had found that I liked some things, and disliked other things. I had always been drawn to outlaws. I liked cleverness and ingenuity. I liked the promise of intriguing revelations. I disliked a hero who was generally smart but did something stupid three-quarters of the way through the book, merely to set up the last part of the action. Detectives on the trail who walked into rooms and got hit over the head from behind just didn’t do it for me. And I liked winners. I was vaguely uneasy with the normal story arc that has a guy lose, lose, lose before he wins in the end. I liked to see something done spectacularly well. In sports, I liked crushing victories rather than ninth-inning nail-biters.
Some of my reading was directed, of course, in school. I was part of probably the last generation ever to receive a classical English education. I read Latin and Greek and Old English, all the ancient myths and medieval sagas and poems. I met the “knight errant” at source.
Then I took a law degree at university. I never intended to be a lawyer, but the subject knit together all my nonfiction interests—history, politics, economics, sociology . . . and language. Legal language strives for concision and avoids ambiguity wherever possible. The result is inevitably dull, but all that striving and avoiding really teaches a person how to write.
Then I went to work in the theater, and developed a phobia. Back then there was plenty of experimental theater, some of it good, most of it awful. The worst of it was run by people who saw their minimal audiences as badges of honor. “The public is too stupid to understand us,” they would say. I hated that attitude. To me, entertainment was a transaction. You do it, they watch it, then it exists. Like a Zen question: If you put on a show, and nobody comes, have you in fact put on a show at all?
So for me, the audience mattered from the start. Which helped me thrive in television. And along the way I discovered I was the audience. We were generally doing quality mass-market entertainment, but even so, some guys were conscious of slumming. Not me. G. K. Chesterton once said of Charles Dickens, “Dickens didn’t write what people wanted. Dickens wanted what people wanted.” I would never compare myself to Charles Dickens, but I know exactly what Chesterton meant.
So, at thirty-nine years of age, after maybe thirty-five years of conscious experience, I sat down and opened the first of my three legal pads on my dining room table and lined up my pencil and sharpener and eraser and . . . thought some more, and came up with three specific conclusions.
First: Character is king. There are probably fewer than six books every century remembered specifically for their plots. People remember characters. Same with television. Who remembers the Lone Ranger? Everybody. Who remembers any actual Lone Ranger story lines? Nobody.
So, my lead character had to carry the whole weight . . . and there was a lot of weight to carry. Remember, I was broke and out of work.
Second conclusion: If you can see a bandwagon, it’s too late to get on. I think the person who said that to me was talking about investment issues—as if I had anything to invest—but it seemed an excellent motto for entertainment, as well. It’s a crowded field. Why do what everyone else is doing?
So, I was going to have to do something a little different. The series that were then well under way—and most that were just starting out—were, it seemed to me, when carefully analyzed, soap operas. (Which, to me, is not a derogatory term. . . . Soap opera is an incredibly powerful narrative engine, and soap operas had put food on my table for eighteen years. Lots of it, and high quality.) Lead characters were primus inter pares in a repertory cast, locations were fixed and significant, employment was fixed and significant. In other words, series heroes had partners, friends, jobs, apartments, favorite bars, favorite restaurants, neighbors, family, even dogs and cats. They jogged, worked out, had pastimes. They had bills to pay and issues to resolve.
If you can see a bandwagon, it’s too late to get on. I was going to have to avoid all that stuff.
But, the third conclusion, and the most confounding conclusion: You can’t design a character too specifically. I knew in my bones that to think too carefully would produce a laundry list of imagined qualities and virtues and would result in a flat, boring, cardboard character. I would be consulting a mental checklist—“I need to satisfy this demographic . . . check . . . and please these people . . . check . . .”—until I had a guy with all the spark and life beaten out of him. So I quite self-consciously pushed that thirty-five-year soup of ideas and influences into the distant background and decided to relax and see what would come along.
Jack Reacher came along.
I was interested in dislocation and alienation, and I had noticed that people who have spent their lives in the military have trouble adjusting to civilian life afterward. It’s like moving to a different planet. So I wrote a character who had been first a military brat, then a military officer, and was now plunged unwillingly into the civilian world. And because the books would be broadly crime novels, I made him an ex–military cop in order to give him plausible familiarity with investigative procedures and forensics and so on. Those twin decisions gave him a double layer of alienation. First, his transition from the rough, tough world of the army made him a fish out of water in civilian life, which situation was then further reinforced by any law enforcement officer’s separation from the rest of the population.
And he was American. I’m British. But by that point I had been a regular visitor to the United States for twenty years—my wife is from New York—and I felt I knew the country pretty well, at least as well as I could expect an alienated ex-military drifter to know it. And it’s easier to be rootless and alienated in a giant country like America. Alienation in a tiny, crowded island like Britain is of a different order, almost wholly psychological rather than physical or literal. I like reading the internal, claustrophobic British books, but I didn’t want to write them. I wanted big, rangy plots; big landscapes; big skies.
Jack Reacher’s status as a former officer happened instinctively. Looking back, I clearly wanted to tap into the medieval knight-errant paradigm, and a knight-errant has to have been a knight in the first place. I thought a West Point history and a rank of major would be suitable. In literary terms it was an important choice, but later I realized it has plausibility issues. His whole personality, approach, and implied past experiences make it much more likely that in the real world he would have been a warrant officer, not a commissioned officer. But to me it was crucial that he should have a certain nobility—which is a strange thing to say about a guy who goes around busting heads as frequently and thoroughly as Jack Reacher does—but it is clear from subsequent reaction that his “white hat” status depends heavily on our images of and assumptions about rank. (And his “white hat” status has tempted readers to classify the series as a set of modern-day Westerns, which is convincing in terms of feel and structure. Some of the novels are just like Shane or a Zane Grey story or a Lone Ranger episode—lonely, embattled community has a problem; mysterious stranger rides in off the range, solves the problem, rides off into the sunset—but I have never been a fan or even a reader of Westerns. What is happening there is that Westerns too have strong roots in the medieval knight-errant sagas. As in much of evolution, if B isn’t descended directly from A, then they both shared a common ancestor much farther back.)
At first he wasn’t called Jack Reacher. In fact, he wasn’t called anything at all. The part of writing that I find most difficult is coming up with character names. My books are heavily populated with stationery brands and other authors, because when I need to name someone I tend to look around my office helplessly until my eye alights on the front of a notebook or the spine of a book on my shelves. Once or twice I stared out my window until a neighbor walked past, or thought back to the name badge of the last clerk I saw in a store . . . all kinds of people get their names in my books, most of them unwittingly. But obviously the main character’s name is very important to get right. With luck it will appear in many books, and even be talked about in other contexts. I started writing with no clear idea of the name. The first book was written in the first person, which meant he didn’t need a name until someone else asked what it was, which didn’t happen for thirty or so manuscript pages. Then a police detective asked, “Name?” I put my pencil down and thought. The best I could come up with was Franklin, as I recall. But I wasn’t happy with it.
Then I went shopping. Part of the problem with not currently having a day job was, well, I didn’t have a day job, and my wife therefore assumed that after many years of solo struggle she now had help with chores. So she asked me to go to the supermarket with her, to carry stuff home. I’m a big guy; she’s a small woman. She was also a worried woman, although she was hiding it well. Our life savings were disappearing, and regular paychecks were merely distant memories. In the supermarket—and this is a common experience for tall men—a little old lady approached me and said, “You’re a nice tall gentleman, so would you reach that can for me?” My wife said to me, “If this writing thing doesn’t work out, you can always be a reacher in a supermarket.” I thought, great name! And I used it, and I smile now when I read Internet commentary imagining I specified the name for its forward-going, striving, progressive implications.
His first name came from conclusion number two: Don’t do what the others are doing. At the time there was a miniature rash of characters with cute or complex first names. So I looked for the simplest and plainest name I could find. I chose Jack, and not as a diminutive for John, either. It’s just Jack. (One of my grandfathers was called Harry, which most people assumed was a diminutive for Henry, but it wasn’t. Harry was on his birth certificate.) In my third book, Tripwire, there’s a passage that starts: “Reacher had been named Jack by his father, who was a plain New Hampshire Yankee with an implacable horror of anything fancy.” I wanted to underpin Reacher’s blunt and straightforward manner with a blunt and straightforward name. I didn’t think the character would have worked with, say, MacNaughten Lawrence for a name. Still don’t. Even though the first name could have been abbreviated to “Mac” on nearly all occasions, the hidden truth on his official papers would have implied something that I didn’t want implied.
So, he’s an ex–military officer, he’s American, he’s alienated, he struggles to participate effectively in civilian society, and he has a plain name.
And he’s huge.
He’s six feet five inches tall, and around two hundred and fifty pounds, all of it muscle. In Tripwire, after he’s been doing physical labor in the sun for a spell, he’s described as looking “like a condom stuffed with walnuts.” No one in his right mind would mess with him. I had in mind the kind of intimidating physical presence that pro footballers have—relaxed, utterly sure of themselves—but in Reacher’s case with a barely visible hint of danger. (In fact, in One Shot, he admits to having played football for Army while at West Point, but that his career was limited to only one game. “Why?” someone asks. “Were you injured?” “No,” he replies. “I was too violent.”) His physical presence is another offshoot of conclusion number two: Don’t do what the others are doing. And for a long time what the others had been doing was making their protagonists more and more flawed and vulnerable. Way back, it had been a welcome development to move away from the uniformly lantern-jawed he-men that had crowded the genre. Heroes became smaller, realistically afraid, physically unexceptional. On the emotional side, they became battered. They were alcoholics, recovering alcoholics, divorced recovering alcoholics, divorced recovering alcoholics living in cabins in the woods and traumatized by professional mistakes. Literal and metaphorical bullets were lodged near hearts. There was an overwhelming feeling of incipient failure and melancholy.
As with all trends, this one was started by inspired pioneers and then overdone by imitators. By the time I started writing I was tired of it. I wanted to start over with an old-fashioned hero who had no problems, no issues, and no navel-gazing. His physical competence is really an expression of his mental competence, too. He’s a fully-functioning person.
And I thought it would be interesting to reverse the paradigm in terms of physical vulnerability. Usually, a book’s hero comes up against people he needs to be afraid of. What if, I asked myself, the hero is the toughest SOB in the valley and others need to be afraid of him? In my fourth book, Running Blind, an FBI agent called Blake threatens to leak Reacher’s name to a violent psychopath called Petrosian. Blake thinks it’s an effective motivator—and in real life and most books it would be. But Reacher just says: “Look at me, Blake. Get real. There’s maybe ten people on the planet I need to be scared of. Extremely unlikely this guy Petrosian happens to be one of them.” I was trying to discover whether drama was possible without the usual David-versus-Goliath structure. I wondered, would Goliath-versus-Goliath work? I have a fan and a friend who works in the gaudy world of pro wrestling—worked, actually, because he’s retired now. You’ll be shocked (shocked!) to hear that their bouts are heavily scripted and rehearsed, even to the extent of having story conferences. My friend’s major concern is that the wrestling paradigm always has the designated good guy lose, and lose, and lose, before winning in the final round. It was hard for him to come to terms with the absence of a battered underdog. But I always wanted Reacher to be the overdog.
Because I was following my instincts. Remember, “Dickens wanted what the audience wanted.” I was the audience. I wanted the kind of vicarious satisfaction that comes from seeing bad guys getting their heads handed to them by a wrong-righter even bigger and harder than them. I thought, isn’t that what fiction is for? Because the existence of fiction is a curious thing. Language evolved way back when leisure was simply unheard of. Language was all about survival, and cooperation, and the dissemination of facts in pursuit of literally life-and-death issues. For most of our existence language has been for telling the truth. Then fiction started up, and we started burning brain cells on stories about things that didn’t happen to people who didn’t exist. Why? The only answer can be that humans deeply, deeply desired it. They needed the consolation. Real life is rarely satisfactory. The transaction is clearly apparent in romantic fiction. In real life, you sit on the subway and you see a beautiful girl. Truth is, you aren’t going to dinner with her, you aren’t taking her home, you aren’t going to live happily ever after. In fact, you aren’t even going to talk to her. But in a novel, all that good stuff happens. It’s a vicarious way to live. Same for crime fiction. In real life, if your house gets burgled or your car gets ripped off, they aren’t going to find the bad guys and you aren’t going to get your stuff back. If someone bullies or disrespects you at work, or in school, or in a relationship, there isn’t much you can do about it. But something can be done about it in a book, and people enjoy watching it happen. They love it. It’s closure, albeit vicarious.
So I wanted Reacher to do what we all want to do ourselves—stand strong and unafraid, never back off, never back down, come up with the smart replies. I thought of all the situations that we find ourselves in—timid, uncertain, scared, worried, humiliated—and imagined a kind of therapeutic consolation in seeing our wildest dreams acted out on the page.
So, Reacher always wins.
Which is theoretically a problem. He’s a plain, uncomplicated man who breezes through life without evident trouble. Shouldn’t he be boring? In theory, yes. But readers don’t agree. Because actually he has plenty of minor problems. He’s awkward in civilian society. He gets around his difficulties by assembling a series of eccentricities that border on the weird. If he doesn’t know how something works, he just doesn’t participate. He doesn’t have a cell phone, doesn’t understand text messaging, doesn’t grasp e-mail. He doesn’t do laundry. He buys cheap clothes, and junks them three or four days later, and buys more. To him, that’s a rigorously rational solution to an evident problem. To us, it’s almost autistic. The contrast between his narrow and highly developed skills and his general helplessness humanizes him. It gives him dimension. He has enough problems to make him interesting, but crucially, he himself doesn’t know he has these problems. He thinks he’s fine. He thinks he’s normal. Hence interest without the whiny self-awareness of the bullet-lodged-near-the-heart guys.
What motivates him?
He has no need for or interest in employment. He’s not a proactive do-gooder. So why does he get involved in things? Well, partly because of noblesse oblige, which is a French chivalric concept that means “nobility obligates,” which in other words mandates honorable, generous, and responsible behavior because of high rank or birth. Reacher had the rank and has the skills, and he feels a slightly Marxist obligation “from he who has, to he who needs.” Again, that attitude predates the twentieth century by a long way. It shows up in nineteenth-century Western heroes and thirteenth-century European heroes, all the way back to the Greeks, and, we can be sure, much farther back into oral traditions where no written records exist. Added to which, in Reacher’s case, is a cantankerousness that provokes him. In Persuader, during a flashback to his military days, he is asked why he became an MP when he could have chosen any other branch of the service. He gives a vague answer, along the lines of wanting to look after the little guy. His questioner is skeptical. She says, disbelievingly, “You care about the little guy?” “Not really,” Reacher admits. “I don’t really care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug people who think they can get away with things.” That’s what motivates him. The world is full of unfairness and injustice. He can’t intervene everywhere. He needs to sense a sneering, arrogant, manipulative opponent in the shadows. Then he’ll go to work. Partly because he himself is arrogant. In a sense, each book is a contest between Reacher’s arrogance and his opponent’s. Arrogance is not an attractive attribute, but I don’t hide Reacher’s because I think the greatest mistake a series writer can make is to get too chummy with his main character. I aim to like Reacher just a little less than I hope you will. Because basically a book is a simple psychological transaction. “I’m the main character,” the main character announces. The reader asks: “Am I going to like you?” There are several possible answers to that question. The worst is: “Yes, you really are, and I’ll tell you why!” But Reacher answers: “You might, or you might not, and either way is fine with me.” Because, as an author, I believe that kind of insouciant self-confidence forms a more enduring bond.
Does it?
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Lee Child
Lee Child is one of the world’s leading thriller writers. He was born in Coventry, raised in Birmingham, and now lives in New York. It is said one of his novels featuring his hero Jack Reacher is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds. His books consistently achieve the number-one slot on bestseller lists around the world and have sold over one hundred million copies. Two blockbusting Jack Reacher movies have been made so far. He is the recipient of many awards, most recently Author of the Year at the 2019 British Book Awards. He was appointed CBE in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours.
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Customer reviews
4.4 out of 5
70,573 global ratings
Jon Linden
5
Who Is Jack Reacher??? How Did Child Construct Reacher's Character??
Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2016
Verified Purchase
The world suddenly got a look at a brand new movie hero in 2014 when the movie, "Jack Reacher" came out starring Tom Cruise as the lead character, Jack Reacher. After that movie I started reading "Jack Reacher" books by Lee Child (Note that Lee Child makes a cameo appearance in the movie "Jack Reacher" and plays a Police Desk Sergeant.) Amongsts those that I read was the very first "Jack Reacher" novel so I could get a feeling of the character from the beginning. I was ecstatic to find that in the 2nd Jove Premium Edition, Copyright 2012, Child writes a new Introduction to the book and explains a lot of things about how the Jack Reacher character came to be and what kinds of things shaped him ionto the character as he existed in the beginning and why and how Child tried to create a 'differentiated detective chaaracter.' he did it well and is now one of the largest selling mystery writers alive today.
On "Jack Reacher" Child says several things that are of note to the reader:
About McGee, Child says things like, "... I liked cleverness and ingenuity ... intriguing revelations ... " And he disliked smart detectives, that did stupid things 3/4'rs of the way through the book. "I like to see something done spectacularly well.
Child developed some rules for his Reacher books which included the following:
First: Character is King: People remember characters. Second: If you can see a bandwagon, it's too late to get on. Third Conclusion, and the most confounding says Child, "You can't design character too specifically."
Child then strts writing and creating the character of Jack Reacher. A character that follows the rules, those of character building, bandwagon aversion and go with the flow to some extent (i.e. do not lock yourself to tightly to an archetype of the character. Thus, a mystery icon was born. And, a mystery character was molded into aa very interesting and provocative series.
In this book, Jack Reacher was more or less just going through a small town in Georgia, when he is arrested for murder. The details and how Reacher finds them are the crux of the story. But this book set the stage for a long series of Jack Reacher books that are now standard faire in the mystery portion of pretty much any library.
Child is good, imaginative and interesting. While I would not compare his work to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the late, great Sherlock Holmes. But I would consider Child one of the best currently writing mystery writers in America, although he originally came from the UK.
"The Killing Floor" is a very fine book for a first book in a series and I highly recommend it to lovers of mystery novels. The books read quickly and keep your interest. They are not literature in the same was as Doyle, but they are good, solid mystery stories that can be read quickly. I highly recommend this book to lovers of mystery novels.
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16 people found this helpful
Paul M. Lawson
5
Great companion to TV series
Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2024
Verified Purchase
After watching season 1(and 2) reading Lee Childs first book helped me get closer to the main character, Reacher. It is a quick read that holds your interest throughout. Well paced and exciting to the end. On to the next book!
Adventure Reader
5
Second Read Through
Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2024
Verified Purchase
I've read all of the Reacher series and decided to start over with Killing Floor and see how things evolved from the beginning. This was a great first effort. However, reading through it a second time had me looking for plot implausibilities. Two popped up. One, if a senior Treasury Agent goes missing, then a second, I'm pretty sure the Feds wouldn't be sitting on their hands for a week. Second, If Kliner was the mastermind counterfeiter, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have 40 million singles stacked up like a haystack in a warehouse. Overall, though, it was a great read and it was worth going down the road again to see how Reacher started out on his post-Army adventure.
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Stephen D. Sullivan
5
Direct Greatness
Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2024
Verified Purchase
The first book in the Reacher series showed me why these books are so popular: simple,direct, muscular writing -- and a hell of a ride. Strong mystery, too. I'll be back for more.
2 people found this helpful
ken gasbarro
5
Excellent first Reacher book.
Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2024
Verified Purchase
Lee Child's Reacher kicks off with a great introduction to his Reacher character!
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