A lone assassin, a killing spree - and the only thing he will say is "Get Jack Reacher for me".
I'm on a Lee Child jag at the moment. Comes of finding a small stack of his books in a charity book shop in Canterbury for £2.50 a go.
This wasn't one of them, but is, in fact, his most recent paperback release.
Terrorist cells, unlikely escapes, and all the clever Child plotting that you could hope for. As ever, heads roll and women succumb.
I read this on holiday, and I'll read it again before the year is out; like a great movie that you have to watch twice to get all the clues, the you are forced to read the Reacher novels at such a pace that it is inevitable that you miss something first time and, believe, me, you never want to go back a page in a Reacher novel while the whole thing is still rolling out in front of you.
Well, it didn't take me long to come back to Lee Child. A disappointment here, a case of reader's block there (it's like writer's block, except you keep finding yourself getting stuck on page 25 of a book that you really want to enjoy), 
and you find a familiar voice calling out to you from the loibrary shelves. This is a fairly recent Jack reacher thriller, and it sees him summoned by an old army comrade to aid in the investigation into the murder of another of his Army days Special Investigation unit. Pretty soon half the old gang is back in town, looking for information and, if necessary, revenge - but who, exactly, is on their tails, and why? The plot line develops convincingly and bloodily - Reacher's own hit rate approaches double figures, and his targets expire in a satisfying variety of ways, and his cameraderie with his ex-colleagues gives an insight to Reacher's state of mind - both for the reader and, it seems, for Reacher himself. It will be interesting to see how he moves on from the experience in future novels, but in the meantime I am going to enjoy myself filling in with the intervening stories.
Series characters - doncha just love 'em? There's something about coming back to the same person time after time, knowing how they are going to react, what their moral code is. Lee Child's Jack Reacher has been around for a while now - thirteen books - but this is the first of them, and the first I have read. Now why haven't I done it before? Child is right there on the bookshop shelves with all the "C"s that I read so avidly - Crais, Connolley, Coben, Connolly... but there's something about the author's name that I have always found a little offputting; prejudice against the name "Lee", perhaps. And then there's the description of Reacher himself - six foot five, two hundred and forty pounds... 
... I remember when it was sufficient for a hero to top out at an even six feet - but then I remember a time when you never saw a girl more than about five feet eight tall, so maybe better diet has worked for heroes too.
I should have ignored the prejudice. Reacher works, in a hard-boiled, tight-lipped, avenging angel sort of way. Women fall for him at the drop of a gun, men respect or fear him, he's not afraid to fall in love, kill a bad guy, or walk away from a woman when it's for her own good.
The plot is a standard format - lone stranger wanders into town, gets banged up by the local police, uncovers dirty doings. But the prose is terse, snappy, driving, and the twists are surprisingly effective (and effectively surprising), and the characters are sufficiently modelled to garner interest and sympathy. I am sure I have seen the major plot device before, but maybe it was Childs who used it here for the first time so I won't hold it against him. I shall seek out more of these; not too frequently, but regularly.
