"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-naïf 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."
Another really good effort by Child but definitely not close to being the best in his prolific Jack Reacher series. I appreciated reading Reacher's first "adventure" six months removed from the military and to see some flashes of the character I would get to know better a few more books into the series. Oddly enough Reacher seemed to be a little more human in his debut story while still being just as lethal. Though I understand his personal motivations for violence in the story, I thought it was a little over the top, even for someone as cold as Jack Reacher. One could argue some of his actions throughout the novel bordered on homicidal, a character trait that luckily usually isn't present in other books by Child.
A decent first outing to an otherwise fantastic series. Recommended, "that's for damn sure," to use one of Jack Reacher's catch phrases.
Completely off topic, I hate the new Blogger interface...
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