Rating: 
Summary: One of the better suspense reads of the year.
Review: Twists of plot, range of interesting characters, subterfuge, draw the reader into the action. It is virtually impossible to stay apart. Excitement mounts as the author creates one impossible, deadly situation after another, and then finds creative but logical means to draw his heroes back from the abyss and save their lives, time after time. Brutality, creativity, emotion, courage - what better combination. Gives a very tilted picture of my home state of Montana - unintentionally I suppose. I wish Child had picked on a different state this time. I have never read an author who places contemporary bad guys in Montana who has ever lived there, probably has never been there, and sometimes doesn't even know where it is.
Rating: 
Summary: About Lee Child
Review: Lee Child was born in Conventry, England, in 1954, early enough to remember playing on left-over World War Two bomb rubble, late enough to be young and impressionable through the Sixties. He went to law school, but took a job in commercial television."I always loved entertainment," he says. "At elementary school, I was always in the school plays. As a teenager, I worked in various shoestring theaters and arts centers. I took vacation jobs anywhere there was a stage and an audience. I never intended to practive law. I did the degree because it was an interesting subject." He joined Granada Television in Manchester, England, thinking the job would last a few months. He ended up staying nearly twenty years. He was there through the great years of British television drama, the years of "Brideshead Revisited," "Jewel in the Crown," "Prime Suspect" and "Cracker." "Those were great shows," he says. "But some of them were luxuries. I preferred the real cutting commercial edge. I love that special area where art meets business--where commercial success is just as important as artistic success. It has its own kind of intense reality...I remember as a kid, growing up in Birmingham, England, people traded auto industry gossip. It was a car town, the British equivalent of Detroit, and that stuff was important. One year, Ford brought out a new model, and there was a story about how they had redesigned the steering wheel over and over again in order to save a penny manufacturing it. People said: Why bother, just to save a penny? But the smart ones saw that a million cars was a million steering wheels which was a million pennies. A worthwhile saving, overall. I loved that. I loved the idea of a designer working with intense real-world pressure." So when he finally gave up television to become a novelist, Child took that attitude with him. He wanted to write successful commercial fiction. "I love the genre," he says.! "I see it as entertainment, pure and simple. I want to write well-crafted books, stylish and satisfying, but above all, commercially successful. One aspect without the other is no good to me. It has to be both." Which meant writing for America, as if he was an American author. Married to a New Yorker, Child had a head start. He knows America well, from years of visiting. "It's what I call the basketball theory," he says. "If I wanted to be a basketball player, I'd always be second best if I stayed in Europe. I would need to go to the NBA in America to find out if I was really any good. It's the same with this kind of thriller. You have to find the toughest league in the world, and then you have to get in there and compete." So far, he's doing fine. His first novel, "Killing Floor," received rave reviews in "People" and newspapers around the country. The financial rewards and the freedom to work wherever he wants means he can now realize a dream he's cherished since childhood. "It's one of my earliest memories," he says. "Imagine provincial England at the end of the Fifties. I was about four, and I went to the public library with my mother. There was a series of kids' books called "My Home in..." and the only one our library had was "My Home in America." There were twelve pages, each with a big color illustration of a home.... There was a prairie farmhouse, a Californian bungalow, a New England Colonial...and my favorite, a Manhattan apartment with a little boy sitting by the window, looking down at the city below. Right away, I knew for sure I wanted to be that boy..." Now he is that boy. After years of dreaming, he's moving to the U.S. in the summer of 1998. "Writing has brought me a lot of rewards. But this is the best of all of them."
Rating:
Summary: A terrific read
Review: In broad daylight on a crowded downtown Chicago street, two armed thugs abduct Jack Reacher and FBI agent Holly Johnson. The pair, who never met before, are handcuffed together and driven to the isolated Montana citadel of militia leader Beau Borden. Jack is getting a full understanding of Murphy's Law as he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Borden learns that Jack is a former Army sniper, he tries to convert the man to his cause of overthrowing the American corrupt government by stealing some missiles and using Holly, daughter of the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a hostage. However, instead of winning Jack over, the two prisoners manage to escape, get captured, escape, get captured, etc. As the military plans to attack Borden's encampment, Jack and Holly need one more escape. DIE TRYING is not the fourth "Die Hard" movie nor is it a cross between "Hogan's Hero's and "Die Hard" even though the novel reads as if it could be either one. The bloody story line will be devoured by the ultra-action fans of high drama and Jack is a fun hero. However, Borden and his men make Colonel Klink and his men look like Einstein, thereby reducing the impact of what is otherwise an exciting thriller. Lee Child shows much talent, but must concentrate as much on his villain as much as he does on the hero and heroine. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: Hard to put down
Review: I have a recurrent grouse that not enough thrillers are good enough at keeping you gripped, so three cheers for this one which I couldn't put down. In fact, apart from Free by Paul Vincent I have had a lean year looking for well written page-turners and it's alreay November. Oh well, Lee Child and Paul Vincent seem to be hard working authors so we'll just need to keep buying their stuff I suppose.
Rating: 
Summary: READ TO THE NTH DEGREE
Review: The voice of former military man Jack Reacher is stentorian, commanding. Leave it to first-rate performer Dick Hill to fully embody whatever character he's reading, and he does Reacher to the nth degree.
As one might expect with such a voice, Reacher is a fully-in-charge kind of guy. That is until the day he's kidnaped along with a woman. That same Chicago day a dentist is abducted from his office parking lot and bunched into the trunk of his car.
Turns out that the woman grabbed along with Reacher is Holly Johnson, a special agent from the FBI's Chicago office. So, of course, the FBI is working overtime in an effort to find her. They've no clue that she's in the clutches of a psychotic neo-Nazi who gets his jollies from watching blood loss.
On the other hand, the psycho has no idea that he has Reacher, a super smart Silver Star hero and a sharpshooter, on his hands. Listen along as Holly and Reacher plot to outsmart their captors.
Rating:
Summary: great--could not put it down
Review: the title says it all. Anyone will like this book
Rating:
Summary: 2nd complicated Jack Reacher thriller is a pleaser !
Review: We were hardly the first to become enamored with Lee Child's new thriller hero Jack Reacher, an ex-military police investigator extraordinaire who beat all odds in his debut in "Killing Floor". He's back in his sophomore outing, and every bit as tough, smart, and determined to save the day as before. This time he's just being a Good Samaritan to an injured woman struggling with her dry cleaning when the two of them are captured by what turns out to be one of those fanatical Montana freedom-or-die militia outfits. The woman, Holly Johnson, a sophisticated FBI agent specializing in white collar crime soon turns out to be almost as gritty as Jack as they are forced to ride for days in a dark panel truck to some unknown destination, held captive each night. That Holly is the daughter of the Joint Chief of Staff seems to be the hostage taker's motive, and before it's over, the FBI, the Marines, and Jack's good ol' ex-boss General Garber are all in on the militia attack. Who will have the final say in life or death is never much in doubt, but there were several times where our leading characters could have been offed, contributing to the non-stop suspense we already expect of Child. We'll also forgive some romantic hijinks 'tween Jack and Holly, although even that development matured to a surprising outcome
With rapidly turning pages and a complicated plot til nearly the last page, we were thoroughly entertained and engaged. Our only quibble might be that Reacher might be like a cat and get "9 lives", but it seems he used every one of them in this tale. We can't wait to dig into the rest of the Child/Reacher series!
Rating:
Summary: Action from the Start
Review: The action literally starts on the first page of this book when the super-hero Jack Reacher is abducted with a woman who had just dropped her dry cleaning. The woman is an FBI agent and, of course, something more. Reacher and she are taken to the outpost of a militia intent on declaring its independence from the USA and doing other unmentionable (here) malicious things.
As usual, Reacher is up to the task - and more. Using his inhuman ability to analyze every problem and shoot every gun known he once again prevails. Like all the Reacher novels, this is action-packed with some good twists and turns in the plot. The super bad guy was a bit over the top, but part of enjoying these books is suspending belief for a time.
A good, fun action-packed read for a period of escapism. Great beach reading.
Rating:
Summary: The Master of Mayhem
Review: Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" novels have a refreshing purity about them: simply action, mayhem, and brutality wrapped around straight, unadorned plots. Testosterone runs high, larger-than-life bad guys take evil to new depths, cliffhangers that would embarrass Indiana Jones. And if there is such a thing as a literary equivalent of film's slow-motion action scenes, then Lee Child is the master. Guns don't simply shoot a bullet; Child talks muzzle velocities, projectile weights, gun barrel chemistry, and the physics of 0.5-inch diameter bullet fired from a Barrett sniper rifle passing through skull and brain. All very violent, and all very entertaining. "Die Trying" is Lee Child's second Jack Reacher novel, and there is no sophomore jinx. Reacher, ex-military cop and veritable walking encyclopedia of all armament, happens on the wrong place at the wrong time in downtown Chicago, finding himself unwittingly in the middle of a kidnapping. The victim: Holly Johnson, a beautiful and brainy FBI agent, but, as it turns out, much, much more. The perps: a band of neo-fascist wacko's - think Waco or Ruby Ridge - about to hatch a plot to declare independence and secede from the United States. Meanwhile, everybody from the FBI to the US Marines tries to find and free Holly, while Reacher works on the inside - as a co-hostage - fights to protect Holly's honor, chastity, and life. Child paints a wonderfully diabolically twisted Beau Borkin as the leader of the cult, and a rather fascinating picture of life inside an extreme right-wing conspiracy. Bottom line: not a novel you'll be retelling to the grandkids, and no literary milestone, but few can verbalize raw power better than Lee Child. A great page-turner, a great diversion, pure entertainment.
Rating: 
Summary: Never met a Jack Reacher book I didn't like
Review: In another rapidly paced action thriller, Lee Child hero, ex military policeman and superstar Jack Reacher, as he is inclined to do, unwittingly stumbles into a kidnapping. While ambling down a Chicago street he accidently collides into an attractive, limping and crutch toting woman knocking down her dry cleaning. While helping her pick up her fallen garments, Reacher and the woman are accosted by two gun wielding guys and forced into a waiting car. They are abducted and then transfered and locked into the cargo area of a truck where they are driven to an unknown destination. In short order Reacher learns that his kidnap companion is FBI agent Holly Johnson who is recuperating from torn knee ligaments and on light duty for the moment. She happens to be the daughter of Joint Chiefs of Staff leader General Johnson and also the god daughter of the president. After a long arduous journey, in which Reacher declines several escape attempts to protect the injured Johnson, they finally arrive at an enclosure deep in the forests of northwestern Montana. This geographically secure enclosure is the home of the Montana Militia, a para-military neo-Nazi group headed by a 400 pound behemoth Beau Borken. Borken, a paranoid and maniacal son of a California farmer who blew his head off when the government repossessed his farm, is a ruthless murderer who has no use for the U.S. government. He plans to use Holly Johnson's kidnapping to convert his militia into a separate nation! The FBI gets wind of the plot through a covert operative within Borken's group. Without presidential support they commence an operation to free Johnson. Reacher, of course, while being held prisoner also plots to accomplish the same thing. Childs' follow up to The Killing Floor, while falling a little short of the intrigue is still suspenseful and a worthwhile chapter in a continuing series.
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