One Shot (Jack Reacher, No. 9)
by Lee Child
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Book Summary Information
Author: Lee ChildEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-03-28
ISBN: 0440241022
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Dell
Book Reviews of One Shot (Jack Reacher, No. 9)
Book Review: An Unlikely Hero
Summary: 2 Stars
Jack Reacher, a man on a mission, arrives in town in the wake of the apparently random shooting of five office workers. All the evidence points towards an ex-marine colleague. He gets a slightly unsatisfactory $6 haircut, ditches his old clothes, buys a pair of deck shoes, some green trousers, and a green shirt, then proceeds to wear them for the entirety of the book (when he's not ironing them by placing them under his motel mattress at night), and yet women still can't resist him. He also manages to evade the entire police force, plus a vicious gang of Russian baddies on foot (whilst dressed all in green) as he negotiates his way round town kicking ass, taking names and concocting theories in his pursuit of the truth, which not only fly in the face of conventional thinking, but are also always proved to be 100% correct. These are two of the problems I encountered with Lee Child's 9th Jack Reacher thriller `One Shot'. However, the main problem I had with it was the fact that last night I stayed up until 2am to finish it and am now quite tired.
One Shot was my first experience of Lee Child's `Jack Reacher' series, and was purchased solely on account of being half price. From the assorted reviews listed on the dust cover I was able to glean that Reacher was an irresistible and uncompromising rebel hero who I naturally assumed I would be rooting for over the course of the next 490 pages. I was somewhat surprised therefore, to find that as Reacher's luck finally ran out and he stood on the sidewalk, hands aloft, yet still wheeling out his `dry' one liners to the Russian sniper who's crosshairs were trained on his head, my overwhelming feeling was `It'd be quite funny if he shot him'. Herein lies the fundamental problem with `One Shot', namely its highly unlikely lead character.
In Reacher, Child has created an ice cold, all-action, fortysomething ex-forces tactical genius with an eye for the ladies, who isn't afraid of who he has to go through in pursuit of justice. In many ways you could draw parallels with Jack Bauer, a man whose maverick ways have kept TV audiences on the edge of their seats through 5 series of 24. But in many ways you couldn't. For example Bauer isn't 6ft5 and 250lbs. He probably never held the title of worlds best shot from a 1km distance. He might struggle to kill a man a lot bigger than him with a minute-long bear hug. And if he walked into your workplace out of the blue, smelling of five day old green clothes and started rabbiting on about conspiracies, you might be more inclined to ask to see some identification or call security, than to lend him your car then join him on a daring midnight raid on a Russian gang's secret lair without the assistance of the police. Jack Bauer is also employed by the government to uncover corruption and root out the bad guys, killing them if need be. For the unemployed Reacher however this is more of a hobby. Well, that and the ladies obviously.
However, it is testament to the genuine suspense generated by 400 pages of ultra-descriptive scene setting and impressively in-depth development of multiple characters that I, like pretty much every woman Reacher has spent more than 5 minutes talking to, didn't get to sleep until past 2am last night. To bring the reader to the point of not only remembering the names of, but also simultaneously being genuinely intrigued to learn the individual fates over the next 90 pages of: a suspect, his sister, a lawyer, his daughter, a chief of police, a district attorney, a news reporter, a shooting range owner, a Russian gang leader, his 4 cronies, and, to a lesser extent, an ice-cold all-action ex-military hero, is no mean feat. The final set piece, Reacher's daring one-man mission into the depths of the Russian gang's hideout, whilst slightly far-fetched is an exciting and satisfactory reward for paying attention to the elaborate, yet not over-complicated, series of events that have gone before.
Through Child's almost almost-obsessively descriptive narrative, a mind's-eye picture every location and character that Reacher encounters can be easily formed, which is the key to ensuring the reader's continued sense of involvement in the story. Unfortunately the picture one is invited to conjure up of Jack Reacher is an unlikely cocktail of Schwarzenegger, Rambo, McQueen, Casanova and the Green Cross Code Man. Difficult to empathise with, and certainly from my point of view, difficult to actually like.
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