Finished this today and it couldn’t have gone by quick enough. I got through it as an audio and anyone who overheard me on my walks listening must have thought I was crazy since I was constantly calling everyone in the novel an idiot. A sorrier bunch of people I’ve hardly met before, Jack included. How did any of them live to adulthood?

I think the other Jack, Reacher that is, has spoiled me. No other “tough guy” is even close to being as competent, observant, prepared or decisive as he is. Repairman Jack has a touch of Hamlet’s disease and spends far too much time waffling and being outmaneuvered. I find his role of Mr. Fixit hard to believe, no one this dumb would live so long. I mean seriously, for example when he knew the Mother was coming all he needed to get was a can of Aquanet and a Bic lighter, instead he takes a shower and goes to find some incendiary bullets. OMG what a dope.

And speaking of dumb, what is with Gia? When she wasn’t whining, she was bitching. When she wasn’t bitching she was being willfully stupid. When she wasn’t being willfully stupid she was crying. What a narrow-minded bitch she was. I have a bit of sympathy for Jack, but have no idea what’s so attractive about her. And she’s saddled with that petulant little brat to boot. I wished the rakoshi would hurry up and get them both. Just eat your tainted oranges and shut up already!

I think it’s a victim of its time. The 80s were a holdover in the “all women must be saved” vein of thrillers. Romance novels were the same way; not a competent female in the bunch, limp little vixens all of them. These days hardly anyone would dare write a female character that way, not even a love interest which was all Gia really was. But she wasn’t the only one; Kolabati was a fainting flower, too.

The supernatural element of the story worked well enough in a 1930s-serial kind of way. A very stylized villain, mutant monsters and a limpid femme fatale. The back story surrounding the Westphalen curse was interesting and I remembered enough from my first reading that I wasn’t surprised that the double Ks were in that temple when it was raided. Too bad there was no explanation of how those necklaces got their powers. The story of the rakoshi and their creation was gone into with detail, but not this. Uneven.

New copies of this book have been updated to reflect the 25-year difference between now and when it was written. Badly updated. Sure, there was a Walkman changed into an iPod and roller skates into rollerblades, a VCR became a DVD player. Possibly the Glock reference is new as Glock only started making guns in the mid-80s. But other things were left to be anachronistic against these new gadgets. The charging around trying to find people on their landlines was one. Not a cell phone in the bunch. And then there was a lot of slamming receivers back into cradles. I guess no one had a cordless at home either. If they weren’t going to be thorough and get it right, they shouldn’t have bothered. Overall it would have hung together better if the whole story had been left in 1984. ( )

Repairman Jack is AMAZING and books one through three are the best, sort of like the Stephanie Plum series. Then the author got all 'cause focused' and had to go anti-God and pro a lot of other things. I would love a suggestion on his later books that are not this way. Repairman Jack was one of the best 'heroes' ever. ( )

This is the first of a long series of books about Repairman Jack, a guy who "fixes" situations for people, sometimes using means outside the law. He has no social security number, no last name, and pays no taxes. But, he has a clearly defined sense of right and wrong, and helps those who can't be helped through conventional means.

This thriller takes outside the usual course of business, though, and revolves around an ancient curse and supernatural opponents who threaten those he holds most dear.

This book got me hooked on Repairman Jack, and I immediately got a hold of the second book in the series, Legacies.

Highly recommended. ( )

The first Repairman Jack novel finds him fighting a supernatural evil unleashed on his ex-girlfriend's daughter because her ancestor defiled a temple in India. Creepy and suspenseful.

The timing conflicts with the prequel Jack: Secret Histories. He's 34 here, somewhere in the 1980s, so he can't have been a teenager in 1983. ( )

Jack "repairs" situations...provides a bit of justice in situations where the law cannot or will not fix a problem. The book is a blend of the thriller/detective genre with a supernatural element. In this episode, Jack is dealing with a vendetta that stretches back a century and a half, threatening the daughter of his girlfriend with death at the hands of horrors from Indian legend.

Wilson makes this work reasonably well. On one hand, the plot is a bit straight-forward and the story is predictable enough that there's not a huge amount of tension. Yet, somehow in spite of that, Wilson makes this work. The characters are entertaining, you can't help rooting for them, and the whole thing moves along quickly with plenty of action.

This is just the kind of grab-a-drink, suspend-disbelief, sit-back-for-a-few-hours type of book that's perfect on Saturday afternoon when you're in the mood for a little guilty pleasure instead of something that makes you think.

The title is a bit of a non sequitur, however—it seems to have no relevance to the book. ( )