The best Jack Reacher adventure yet - the entire thing might hinge on an extreme premise, but if you accept this premise, the rest of the story falls into place.

It has great action, great suspense, lots of beatings and killings and is not overly gory like it could have been. No romance and no political complaining (there is a bit of coverage of race relations in Texas, but it's not overwhelming and does make up part of the story so is blended into the storyline). ( )

In the 5th Jack Reacher novel, hitchhiking takes a dangerous turn. Reacher is picked up by a woman who wants to escape from her abusive husband. The only escape she can envision is his death. Although Reacher refuses to do the deed, and tries to talk Carmen into just leaving, he believes her about the covert abuse. When Carmen's husband turns up dead, Reacher investigates the death trying to find a way for Carmen to keep her daughter and not spend her life in jail. The storyline includes a lot of tension caused by race relations between Hispanics and Caucasians in western Texas. (I listened to the narration by Dick Hill, who continued to do an excellent job of bringing Jack Reacher to life.) ( )

Traditional Jack Reacher format, always an enjoyable, entertaining read. ( )

Jack Reacher travels the country with the clothes on his back and a folding toothbrush in his pocket. Hitchhiking through Texas, he’s picked up by Carmen Greer, a beautiful Hispanic woman. Although Carmen’s husband Sloop Greer is from a rich family, she only has $1.00 in her purse. Her husband’s in prison and Carmen hopes he stays there but Sloop’s worked out a deal with the federal authorities and is expected home. Carmen’s been cruising the streets, looking for someone she can talk into murdering her husband because he physically abused her before he went to prison and she’s afraid he’ll kill her once free. Reacher agrees to go with Carmen to Sloop’s ranch to protect her but tells her he will not commit murder. Just hours after Sloop’s home, he’s found in his bedroom, shot to death by Carmen’s gun. Carmen’s arrested and Reacher teams up with a lawyer from the legal mission to find out who really shot Sloop Greer.

Reacher is one of the best characters written today; a strong man who is comfortable with himself and his own personal scruples. He’s a cultured man with intelligence who lives a nomadic, asocial lifestyle and can be brutal without remorse if he feels it’s deserved. In Echo Burning, there are plots and subplots which Child ties together nicely, providing a boatload of suspense along the way. ( )

(First reviewed at Blogcritics at http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/...)

The fifth novel in the Jack Reacher series (by Lee Child) brings Reacher to Texas, near the Mexican border. He is drawn into the complex affairs of Carmen Greer, a woman of Hispanic origins, married to a wealthy Texas oilman named Sloop Greer who, she says, secretly beats her. At the beginning, Sloop is in prison serving a sentence for tax evasion, and she fears what will happen when he comes home. When he comes home, Sloop is shot and Carmen is arrested for his murder. Meanwhile a squad of hired killers is killing off Sloop's contacts.

The story moves at a nice pace, with the double climax of a bloody gun battle between Reacher and the death squad, and the discovery of who was responsible for most of the violence and death.

Child seems to move surely through rural America and manages to sound like an American, although he is a British ex-patriate. He seems to have done his homework in firearms, police procedure, court process and history. He makes the odd mistake - in one scene Reacher gazes into a box of pistol cartridges "sitting on their firing pins." I don't know if factory ammunition is packed primer down, but the firing pin is part of the gun, not the cartridge. On the whole, he manages to make his characters and story sound credible.

Reacher is a unique and interesting character. He practices disengagement. He travels by hitchhiking and stays in cheap hotels. He buys cheap clothes and throws them out instead of laundering them. He is a 6' 4", 250 lb ex-military policeman, who gets into fights in bars, but he seems to avoid police attention. He is a bit of a smart-ass and sometimes just a prick. He continually gives the names of 19th century American presidents when asked for his name, and seems to make fun of the many waitresses and hotel clerks who don't get the joke. He seems to be well read, and he seems to have disengaged from the world through a sense of distaste for the social order. Within a few pages he answers a quote from Balzac ("Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught" with a quote from Marcuse ("Law and order are always and everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy"). At the same time, he is not cynical or mean.

It's hard to say if Child has deliberately created Reacher as a composite character. He seems to have the itinerant lifestyle and the cultural eye of Travis McGee, taken to an extreme, the supercilious sarcasm of Spenser, and the evil temper of Dave Robicheaux. It's hard to avoid those comparisons within the ambit of mystery fiction, in which the protagonist is always a knight-errant or a Lone Ranger, on a quest for justice in a dark world. Reacher has more of a lone Samurai quality (or perhaps a Dirty Harry quality), because he seems to be entirely without connections or roots, living to his own code of honour.

Child does well with many other characters. They speak distinctively, and they are credible, rather than stereotypes. The exceptions, in this book, are the gang of hired killers. They are faceless, nameless entities, practicing an unimaginable trade. Probably Child decided to leave them as vaguely malevolent non-entities, doomed to die when they come up against the hand of the hero.

Child has a good eye and ear, and he writes a vivid, hot, dusty Texas. However Texas seems to come out badly. The wealthy Texas families seem in this book are crude racists. The blue collar Texas are redneck cowboys. The only good Texan seems to the the Jewish lesbian lawyer from the east who agrees to defend Carmen. This is partly a function of the way Child writes Reacher, who must transcend a corrupt milieu to dispense justice, but I think that Child might be more subtle and tolerant of local culture.

I think the Reacher series is considerably better than the average mystery-adventure series. ( )