Jack's Back!

I was in the Campus Bookstore yesterday (it's finals week ... very few students were there) looking for a paperback to read during my lunch hours for the rest of the week. I found a SF novel by a female writer I've been reading for years, and Pompei by Richard Harris, who was recommended to me by WhiteFish.

Ho hum, okay, I'll take them both.

At the checkout counter, I learned there was a 'special' this week only: buy two paperbacks, get a third paperback for free. The clerk suggested that if I went back in the stacks and found a third paperback, it would be free.

I hadn't seen anything that looked very attractive, but what the heck -- it's a freebie. Back I went to look for a 3rd paperback. I already had about $16 invested, maybe I can find SOMETHING I haven't already read.

Bad idea. I didn't find a paperback, I found a $26 hardback by one of my favorite 'thriller' novelists, Lee Child.

That's right, Lee's 11th Jack Reacher novel, "Bad Luck and Trouble", was released on May 15, 2007, and I didn't even know about it!

So I grabbed the Lee Child Book (always a good idea) and dragged it back to the clerk.

As it happens, with my staff discount I got two paperbacks and Childs' "Bad Luck and Trouble" for less than the cost of the hardback.

[Gloat!]

This is the 11th book in Child's "Jack Reacher" series, and it's right up there with the best work he has ever done. We can only compare it with other "Reacher" books, because that's all Child has written to date. If you're a reader of Connelly 's "Hieronymous Bosch" series, you know that a Mystery/Thriller writer can make a good living turning out one novel a year based on a single unique protagonist.

I bought the book at Noon on Tuesday. I finished it at 8am on Wednesday, and completed a full workday Tuesday. That shows how un-put-downable Child's writing is.

The un-put-downable factor is my primary criteria for readability in fiction genre. This is usually based on the successful creation of an appealing main character. Stephen Hunter, for example, wrote a couple of books which weren't terribly appealing until he started his "Bob The Nailer" series. In that, he developed first Bob, then went off on a tangent with Bob's father Earl, who shared a common history. Both characters were fascinating, and the series was a maga-hit. (Note that a strong character isn't enough by itself; Hunter wrote "Havana" in 2003; it was so bland that I couldn't even stay awake on the plane ride to the Shirley Skinner Make-A-Wish Match in Waco and back.)

I enjoyed the Jack Reacher book, which is no less than I had expected. There are a few writers who are so consistently excellent that I'll spend $25+ for an early release of their latest novel in hardbound, and Child is definately in the top four. (The other three are John Ringo, David Drake and S.M. Stirling -- all SF writers. Sorry, Michael Connelly is Number 5.)

All of these authors write about iconic action figures, sort of Literary Transformers, although of course the SF writers sparkle because they create interesting worlds into which they insert iconic characters while Child and Connelly work within the 'real world' ... sorta.

BTW, Stirling has two new books coming out in September and October (one is the sequel to "A Meeting in Corvallis", the other is not) Hunter's next Bob the Nailer novel "The 47th Samurai" (due out September 11, 2007) is already on order, and I'll be ordering Hunter's "American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill President Truman -- And The Shoot-out That Stopped It" as soon as I publish this article.

Which is to say .... now!