I presume the Reacher series has gotten better or it wouldn't have sold so many copies but this one is predicable and ridiculous. ( )

Quick easy read, obviously Reacher is not fully evolved this being the first book. But a great story. ( )

The TV show was a guilty pleasure. Male ego wish fulfillment. Pow. Blam. Pretty women. I thought, maybe the books have a bit more to them. Nope. Less. Imagine if Spenser wasn't witty. Imagine a generic small town, a world full of ridiculous coincidences. Is our hero bright and perceptive, or is he surrounded by morons. Fortunately, the writing saves this, maybe? "The big dark sedan rolled north through the night like a stealthy animal leaving its lair." Nope. The author wrote a long, pat-himself-on-the-back foreword before this dreck, too. ( )

(1997)First in Jack Reacher series is a good introduction to a former MP and cop who is drifting across country and gets involoved in a small GA town's involvement in high stakes counterfeiting. Not very plausible though. The transient Jack Reacher finds himself in tiny Margrave, Georgia, and is almost immediately arrested, if briefly, as a murder suspect. Imagine his surprise when he discovers that one of the victims is his brother, a brilliant U.S. Treasury agent. Reacher himself is no slouch; a former military policeman, he can dispatch villains with an astonishing array of weapons, including various parts of his body. In the company of a straight-arrow detective and a beautiful lady cop, Reacher soon unearths a conspiracy stretching through the little town and beyond. Blood flows freely, terrible threats are made and carried out, and body parts accumulate. First novelist Child, a former television writer, stretches coincidence outrageously in this would-be noir outing, whose hero is creepily amoral, violent, and generally unpleasant. Only large pop fiction collections need consider. (Library Journal)Kirkus: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 Joe, whom he hadn't seen in seven years. So Reacher, who so far hasn't had anything personally 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 trustÂ¥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 bedÂ¥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 momentsÂ¥not that there are many of them to judge by. Despite the crude, tough-naif 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.Pub Date: March 17, 1997ISBN: 0-399-14253-3Page Count: 368Publisher: PutnamReview Posted Online: May 20, 2010Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997Wikipedia:Jack Reacher gets off a Greyhound bus in the town of Margrave, Georgia, because he remembers his brother mentioning that a blues musician named Blind Blake had died there. Much to his surprise, shortly after his arrival, he is arrested in a local diner for murder on the orders of the sheriff, Morrison, who falsely claims he saw Reacher leave the scene.While in custody, Reacher meets Finlay, the chief of detectives, and Roscoe, a female officer who believes him to be innocent. Reacher persuades Finlay to call a number on a piece of paper found in the dead man's shoe; the number leads them to Paul Hubble, a retired banker who instantly confesses to the murder. Before Reacher can be released, he and Hubble are transferred to a state prison in Warburton, where Reacher manages to thwart an attempt on their lives by the Aryan Brotherhood. Suspecting that the deputy warden set them up, Reacher joins Finlay's investigation, while Hubble is presumed dead after vanishing from his house in the middle of the day.Reacher learns that the murdered man is his brother, Joe, who was running an investigation into a counterfeiting ring operated by the Kliner family under the protection of Morrison, several dirty cops, and the corrupt mayor, Grover Teale. A second body, belonging to truck driver Sherman Stoller, is found, and Morrison and his wife are brutally murdered shortly thereafter. Roscoe theorizes that the Kliners are using Margrave as a distribution hub for their counterfeit money, but this is eventually disproven when Reacher searches one of their trucks and finds it empty. He then realizes that the opposite is true: the Kliners have been hoarding the money in response to a Coast Guard operation cutting off their supply of bills from Venezuela, and plan to resume distribution once the operation is shut down as a cost-saving measure.Sending Hubble's family into hiding to protect them from Kliner, Reacher kills his son and several other associates after luring them into an ambush. He then informs Finlay of the secret behind Kliner's operation, which his brother had been trying to prove: to obtain the special paper required to make undetectable forgeries, the criminals had employed Hubble to collect hundreds of thousands of used $1 bills and send them to ports in Florida through Stoller and other drivers, whereupon they would be bleached in Venezuela to remove the ink and then used to make forged $100 bills. However, when they return to Margrave, they are taken captive by Kliner, Teale, and Finlay's FBI contact Picard, who reveals that he's been keeping track of their progress, and has Roscoe and Hubble's family in his custody. Kliner reveals that Hubble isn't dead, but in hiding, and threatens to kill his hostages unless Reacher finds him.En route, Reacher stages a distraction and kills Picard's escorts, before apparently shooting him dead. He then locates Hubble in a nearby motel, and brings him back to Margrave. Finding the criminals gone, they spring Finlay from captivity in the police station and set it on fire, before locating the hostages at Kliner's warehouse. Reacher kills a dirty cop named Baker, shoots Teale and Kliner, and sets fire to the rest of their money. A wounded Picard shows up and beats Reacher down, but Finlay distracts him long enough for Reacher to kill him. The group then escapes as the warehouse explodes, and Reacher ends up spending the night with Roscoe. Realizing that his actions will attract a lot of unwanted attention from the authorities, Reacher decides to leave Georgia. Roscoe gives him one last gift: a picture of his brother retrieved from one of Kliner's victims.

Just OK. I have heard a lot about how great Jack Reacher is but I'm afraid I just don't get it. I'm guessing the writing gets better in later books but I'm not sure I want to bother finding out. ( )