A review by evanssc4
Killing Floor by Lee Child

4.0

When I first started this book I wasn't very impressed with it. It felt like too much of a stereotypical murder mystery in which random, too-good-to-be-true events would dominate the entire story and take away any sense of caring for the characters. To be sure, Reacher seems to have an incredible lucky streak in which everything just seems to go right for him. That being said, as the book progressed I started to get a feel for how Child organized the story and could start to pick out things that would be important. It, at least for me, was the right level of giving me a chance to figure it out for myself without having the solution just slap me in the face. I didn't ever feel like I was being spoon fed the clues, like some authors tend to do, but I also never felt that I was intentionally being kept in the dark or that important parts of the story were being withheld from me. I have to imagine that the first person style is what contributed to this because whatever Reacher saw and heard, I saw and heard so I was just as capable of figuring out whatever he figured out. And, really, the mystery was only part of the book; I knew what was happening and who was doing it by the halfway mark, the rest of it was more suspense about who would catch who first.

In the end I found myself constantly saying, "I've got two minutes I can cram another few pages in." I had planned to finish the book in about two weeks but it ended up only taking about five days or so, if that says anything for how I ended up liking it. There's nothing particularly complicated about this book and, even with my slow reading pace, is a quick book once you get into the mood of it. It even manages to break through my personal inhibitions about the genera, in which I find most books these days to be repetitive and cliched (oh, wow, another book where hero doesn't know who the murder is until the last fifty pages). All in all I would say this one lives up to the Reacher hype and is worth a quick read through if anyone is looking for a fast read for a long bus ride. I can't speak for the rest of the series, but this book has at least made me interested in reading the next one eventually, if that says anything.