I came across Lee Child by chance. Having developed the convenient habit of travel reading, I make it a point to carry a book or two on trips. For that particular journey I had a book left by someone: Make Me and it made me reach for another Lee - Bad Luck and Trouble. The trouble is Jack Reachers are addictive if you're into that sort of thing - good fight scenes, in particular.

Tripwire offers giant doses of romance and a truly evil villain.

The story begins with Reacher digging swimming pools in a part of the US that the author had visited during a vacation in the nineties. Someone is looking for Reacher. And that person is found dead. Two goons have also been inquiring about him. Are they killers?

Our hulk, Reacher, sets off to find out the who, what, why, when and where of it all. Which leads him to a very attractive young lady lawyer who happens to be the daughter of Gerber, an officer Reacher respects. Together the couple traverse many hair raising adventures to solve the mystery. In the meanwhile, we get to enjoy the villain and his dastardly accomplices in action.

The romance might be a bit icky to some as there's the age thing. Jodie was a teenager when they first met. The fact that Gerber was a father figure to Reacher and that Reacher met Jodie when she was a young girl and had the hots for her bring in a touch of the forbidden.

The grotesque villain also comes in the way of full enjoyment - he's almost like Captain Hook!

Nevertheless, Lee Child is always a satisfying read. He brings geography and technical things alive and we also get some historical perspectives. In this case, it's the ill-fated Vietnam war. What happened to prisoners? How were the injured cared for? In all the confusion of those times, all kinds of mess ups and cover ups became possible.

Even though Tripwire will not be among my top Reacher books, I'm busy devouring two more. And I leave you with a wonderful chance to eavesdrop on two great contemporary writers:

It's not often that one finds a thoroughly satisfying thriller these days. So many write but few know how to exercise the craft. Lee Child's Make Me plunges the reader into scenarios that typically spell action, danger and, generally speaking, a good time for the reader. However, such things, by their very nature, invite censure. In this post, I hope to give the author a twirl in the light of this one book, using various views from the Net.

On the surface, he is such a popular author that a blogger reports:

I returned this book to the library and searched for more Jack Reacher books. To my disappointment, I was told by the librarian, all of their Jack Reacher novels are being loaned out.

Daniel's Corner Unlimited

It is also claimed that reading any one book of his is bound to create a craving to read his other works. His status jumps further when we find there is a book about how he wrote this book.

“He would have been good around the campfire, Lee – he would definitely make you forget about the wolves or the saber-tooth”, Martin writes. But it’s not only the engrossing plot. One of the things that immediately struck me about Child’s writing is a captivating attention to stylistic details such as word choice, syntax, punctuation – a kind of poetry that I now realise is fully conscious, intentional. “It all mattered, linguistically”, Martin writes. It’s about noticing things. And to see the process unfold is fascinating. Child writes only one draft, but the meticulousness with which he constructs the narrative allows him to.

Lee Child and the Making of Make Me by Andy Martin

Top this with his ingenuous words about the love scenes in his novels and we have a definite person of interest.

“The suspense and attraction is enjoyable to write about but sex itself is unbelievably difficult and there’s no convincing way to do it.“Although I don’t plan my books in advance, I sense when it is coming up in the story and I get performance anxiety… just as you might between the sheets. As much as possible I let the reader imagine it themselves and will finish off with something along the lines of ‘The bedroom door closes’ — that way people won’t laugh at what I write.

Writing Jack’s love scenes gives me the performance anxiety you get with real sex

What has also charmed me about the author is his attitude to money:

MarketWatch: What’s been your (and Reacher’s) biggest money mistake?

Lee Child: Reacher’s and mine would be the same, really. And it’s only a mistake half of the time. I only have cash, I bank at the first national bank of Sealy Posturepedic. All my money is just in a checking or savings account. I have no investments, no stocks, no shares, no vehicles, no nothing. It just sits in the bank, which makes me look really smart in bad times. I never lost a cent, ever, in the ups and downs, but of course I’ve never made a cent either when times are good. So sometimes you look dumb and sometimes you look smart. I’ve got real estate, but I have no stocks, no mutual funds, nothing at all.

Bestselling author Lee Child keeps all his money in cash (as does Jack Reacher)

When I reminded a friend last night about his having liked the book - this is a person who rarely has time to read - he surprised me by having a very moral stand. This stand is what is tackled by a teacher on the Net.

I’d asked my students what they thought of Reacher, and they suggested that he should stand trial for murder. Then, reading carefully through his interior monologues, they decided that he was insane and had him remitted to a high-security mental health facility. In our summary discussion, we talked a lot about Reacher as post-Cold War John Rambo, the Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD who wanders into a small town in the Pacific Northwest and runs afoul of the local police. The point, for my students, was that Reacher should never have been set loose on the American countryside. Jack Reacher troubles me, too.

'Jack Reacher' Embodies the American View of Justice: White, Male, and Lawless

Be that as it may, with a Tom Cruise Jack Reacher movie to his credit, only a hardcore hater of the genre can resist the lure of a Lee Child!

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back Official Trailer

There's something about trains, highways, fields and pigs that is guaranteed to get the thriller addict's blood racing. All in all, it's the action scenes that not only make such books easy to move into movie mode but also draw us into the plot and keep us turning the pages:

Midway through Lee Child’s latest in the Jack Reacher series, “Make Me,” Reacher stands facing an armed man in a doorway. As is often the case in the Reacher novels—which involve, invariably, Reacher tumbling across some kind of malevolent conspiracy in the American heartland and killing everyone involved—Reacher is unarmed. He likes to travel light and acquires his guns on an as-needed basis. But the bad guy has a Ruger P-85 nine-millimetre with a nine-inch suppressor attached to the end of the barrel. Reacher is a giant—six feet five and built like a block of stone—and some part of his brain tells him that he’s safer in the hallway than inside the door, because the guy with the gun won’t want to shoot him in a semi-public place. How on earth do you move a dead, six-feet-five block of stone? He steps forward. The bad guy says, “Don’t move.” Reacher steps forward again. The bad guy says, “Back up now.” Reacher doesn’t, and with that act of defiance the power balance between the two of them shifts, imperceptibly, even though, by rights, it shouldn’t—and we are off once again, in what will prove to be one of many ever-escalating, ever-more-exhilarating outbreaks of bloodshed.

The Lawless Pleasures of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher Novels

The novel is fairly action packed from the word go:

“Grain, meet the railroad” Jack Reacher tells himself, after he’s picked the latest sinister little Nowheresville in which to spend a book’s length of time. He appears to have gotten off a train in the middle of wheat country, for no better reasons than he liked the cryptic name of the town, Mother’s Rest, and that he’s got foolproof instincts for sniffing out trouble. Lee Child’s Reacher series has hit Book No. 20 with a resounding peal of wisecracking glee (“Are you going to be a problem?” “I’m already a problem. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”). Everything about it, starting with Reacher’s nose for bad news, is as strong as ever.

In ‘Make Me,’ Lee Child Adds Another Layer to Jack Reacher

Very soon, we are plunged into explosive action:

Reacher was expecting a quaint little place with a small museum explaining the town’s unusual name and history, but it turns out that everything about Mother’s Rest is way off base. There is something ominous about the town and that’s quickly confirmed after Reacher meets FBI agent turned P.I., Michelle Chang. She’s looking for her partner and their client’s son, both of whom have simply disappeared. Reacher decides to help her and suddenly the book deviates from the standard Lee Child template.