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A review by lpm100
Killing Floor by Lee Child
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
3.0
Book Review
Jack Reacher: Killing Floor
3/5 stars
Light and readable; Extremely implausible
*******
This book was recommended to me by somebody at work.
I saw that it had 66,313 Amazon reviews and I thought that there might be something to it.
Then again, "Fifty Shades" has 111,868. So there's that.
It was a fun read, but I will not be picking up a Jack Reacher book again.
Even though this book is 500 pages, the prose is so light that it can be read through in a day or two.
Lee Child says that Jack Reacher was inspired by a "medieval knight-errant paradigm" but that seems unrelatable to almost all human beings. To me it seems more like Reacher was inspired by Hannibal Lecter ("Silence of the Lambs"): in the first case, you have a psychiatrist of superhuman intelligence that is helping people (that it doesn't exactly make sense for Lecter to help) produce a psychological profile of a killer. In this case, you have a forensic expert/trained killer of what seems to be supehuman intelligence helping people (that it doesn't exactly make sense for him to help).
The biggest problems are 2:
1. We have seen the case before where some Englishman thinks that because we speak the same language that he can just deduce what conditions are in the United States.
The "Fifty Shades" author did the same thing, choosing to set her book in Washington because that happens to have been a state that she heard of. But then she put in you suggested a completely foreign to American ears, such as "ringing someone on the phone" or "taking a smart rucksack on holiday."
He says that his wife is from New York. Didn't she offer some proofreading?
A selected listing of some of the awkward words:
smart (as in, a smart dark green car)
copse (instead of "thicket")
automatic box ("transmission")
jink (a very Scottish word in place of "zigzag")
grauch ("crackle")
a. This author had white people going into black barber shops, which NEVER EVER happens in the United states. I have seen with my own eyes a white guy walking into a barbershop when I was a child asking the price of a haircut, and they told him that he would have to go down the street because they didn't know how to work with straight hair there.
b. Black beauty shops are never open on Sunday and Monday and barber shops are only rarely open those times. Even less likely in the South.
2. Just, plausibility issues. And I know that you need to make a plot work, but there's only so many improbable things in sequence that a reader can be asked to believe. I don't know if it was the author's intention, but this book is bordering on magical realism:
a. Who can live with no form of identification and do everything that he needs without them? Paying cash is not enough if you want to do something like rent a car. And also not enough for most hotels.
b. Jack Reacher goes to the penitentiary and they allow him to keep his street clothes on? Has anybody ever heard of this?
c. (p.44) The protagonist has never even finished a single semester in the same high school? He has not been in one place long enough, but he had music lessons, such that he had perfect pitch and could transpose in his head Bobby Blue Bland down from G to E-flat?
d. Over 3 million square miles of the United states, and he ends up in the exact same city where his brother that he is not seen in 7 years was murdered 2 days ago?
e. Somebody is arrested one day and then a couple of days later is working front and center with the police of a local department with no badge and no interest in this?
f. Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. How long could a counterfeiting operation like this stay a secret with so many people involved? 5 minutes? 10 minutes?
Also, they would have to be some paper trail somewhere that would show all of this money coming into this poor southern town from nowhere.
g. Somebody gives a guy with no ID and no address a Bentley and a stack of cash to ride around in? For that matter, if somebody owns a Bentley, who takes it to work everyday?
h. Busts into a police house and a firehouse with a Rolls-Royce Bentley and it works out exactly the way that he thinks it did to extricate someone from jail in 90 seconds.
Minor problem: Some number of clichés--and this is probably unavoidable in this type of book. (And the author does mention that he is aware of some of these dangers.)
a. Magical Negro (Finlay. This is a common Stephen King device.)
b. Small racist Southern town
c. Disinterested hero rides off into the sunset (a lot of westerns are like this)
d. Damsel in distress
e. The character that the reader is misdirected to think is dead all through the novel and he magically reappears within the last 50 pages. (Just like in "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.")
Verdict: it's worth it if you have some spare time and $1.
Jack Reacher: Killing Floor
3/5 stars
Light and readable; Extremely implausible
*******
This book was recommended to me by somebody at work.
I saw that it had 66,313 Amazon reviews and I thought that there might be something to it.
Then again, "Fifty Shades" has 111,868. So there's that.
It was a fun read, but I will not be picking up a Jack Reacher book again.
Even though this book is 500 pages, the prose is so light that it can be read through in a day or two.
Lee Child says that Jack Reacher was inspired by a "medieval knight-errant paradigm" but that seems unrelatable to almost all human beings. To me it seems more like Reacher was inspired by Hannibal Lecter ("Silence of the Lambs"): in the first case, you have a psychiatrist of superhuman intelligence that is helping people (that it doesn't exactly make sense for Lecter to help) produce a psychological profile of a killer. In this case, you have a forensic expert/trained killer of what seems to be supehuman intelligence helping people (that it doesn't exactly make sense for him to help).
The biggest problems are 2:
1. We have seen the case before where some Englishman thinks that because we speak the same language that he can just deduce what conditions are in the United States.
The "Fifty Shades" author did the same thing, choosing to set her book in Washington because that happens to have been a state that she heard of. But then she put in you suggested a completely foreign to American ears, such as "ringing someone on the phone" or "taking a smart rucksack on holiday."
He says that his wife is from New York. Didn't she offer some proofreading?
A selected listing of some of the awkward words:
smart (as in, a smart dark green car)
copse (instead of "thicket")
automatic box ("transmission")
jink (a very Scottish word in place of "zigzag")
grauch ("crackle")
a. This author had white people going into black barber shops, which NEVER EVER happens in the United states. I have seen with my own eyes a white guy walking into a barbershop when I was a child asking the price of a haircut, and they told him that he would have to go down the street because they didn't know how to work with straight hair there.
b. Black beauty shops are never open on Sunday and Monday and barber shops are only rarely open those times. Even less likely in the South.
2. Just, plausibility issues. And I know that you need to make a plot work, but there's only so many improbable things in sequence that a reader can be asked to believe. I don't know if it was the author's intention, but this book is bordering on magical realism:
a. Who can live with no form of identification and do everything that he needs without them? Paying cash is not enough if you want to do something like rent a car. And also not enough for most hotels.
b. Jack Reacher goes to the penitentiary and they allow him to keep his street clothes on? Has anybody ever heard of this?
c. (p.44) The protagonist has never even finished a single semester in the same high school? He has not been in one place long enough, but he had music lessons, such that he had perfect pitch and could transpose in his head Bobby Blue Bland down from G to E-flat?
d. Over 3 million square miles of the United states, and he ends up in the exact same city where his brother that he is not seen in 7 years was murdered 2 days ago?
e. Somebody is arrested one day and then a couple of days later is working front and center with the police of a local department with no badge and no interest in this?
f. Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. How long could a counterfeiting operation like this stay a secret with so many people involved? 5 minutes? 10 minutes?
Also, they would have to be some paper trail somewhere that would show all of this money coming into this poor southern town from nowhere.
g. Somebody gives a guy with no ID and no address a Bentley and a stack of cash to ride around in? For that matter, if somebody owns a Bentley, who takes it to work everyday?
h. Busts into a police house and a firehouse with a Rolls-Royce Bentley and it works out exactly the way that he thinks it did to extricate someone from jail in 90 seconds.
Minor problem: Some number of clichés--and this is probably unavoidable in this type of book. (And the author does mention that he is aware of some of these dangers.)
a. Magical Negro (Finlay. This is a common Stephen King device.)
b. Small racist Southern town
c. Disinterested hero rides off into the sunset (a lot of westerns are like this)
d. Damsel in distress
e. The character that the reader is misdirected to think is dead all through the novel and he magically reappears within the last 50 pages. (Just like in "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.")
Verdict: it's worth it if you have some spare time and $1.