Thursday, April 23, 2015

the luxury of Reacher

I started a new Reacher novel the other day. For me, luxury is having a stack of unread mystery novels at hand. Fiction leaves me kind of meh these days--mostly because I'm not quite sure who to read and I'm tired of self-conscious New Yorker/MFA prose.
However. Lee Child's Reacher series never fails to thrill. The main character is a brawny, six-and-a-half foot tall ex-MP roaming around the USA righting wrongs, mostly with his bare hands and his wits. The stories are funny and amazingly detailed. You know how Reacher makes decisions and why and as a reader you're on edge until the last page. No data dumps at the end, no wild explanations, and almost never a happy ending for the occasional woman who crosses his path.
Starting a Reacher novel is bittersweet, as I'm already regretting how soon I'll finish it. The last one I read almost made me miss a bus! I was so engrossed in the story that the Metro bus pulled up to my stop and sat there, door open, the driver peering out at me until I came to, folded over the page to mark my spot, and hopped on.

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