Jack Reacher #1
Jove
May 2006
On Sale: April 25, 2006
Featuring: Jack Reacher
432 pages ISBN: 0515141429 EAN: 9780515141429 Paperback (reprint) Add to Wish List
Welcome to Margrave, Georgia—but don't get too attached to
the townsfolk, who are either in on a giant conspiracy, or
hurtling toward violent deaths, or both.
There's not much of a welcome for Jack Reacher, a casualty
of the Army's peace dividend who's drifted into town idly
looking for traces of a long dead black jazzman. Not only do
the local cops arrest him for murder, but the chief of
police turns eyewitness to place him on the scene, even
though Reacher was getting on a bus in Tampa at the time.
Two surprises follow: The murdered man wasn't the only
victim, and he was Reacher's brother whom he hadn't seen in
seven years. So Reacher, who so far hasn't had anything
personal against the crooks who set him up for a weekend in
the state pen at Warburton, clicks into overdrive.
Banking on the help of the only two people in Margrave he
can trust—a Harvard-educated chief of detectives who hasn't
been on the job long enough to be on the take, and a smart,
scrappy officer who's taken him to her bed— he sets out
methodically in his brother's footsteps, trying to figure
out why his cellmate in Warburton, a panicky banker whose
cell-phone number turned up in Joe's shoe, confessed to a
murder he obviously didn't commit; trying to figure out why
all the out-of-towners on Joe's list of recent contacts were
as dead as he was; and trying to stop the local carnage or
at least direct it in more positive ways. Though the
testosterone flows as freely as printer's ink, Reacher is an
unobtrusively sharp detective in his quieter moments—not
that there are many of them to judge by.
Despite the crude, tough-naĂŻf narration, debut novelist
Child serves up a big, rangy plot, menace as palpable as a
ticking bomb, and enough battered corpses to make an
undertaker grin.
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