Echo Burning: Jack Reacher, Book 5 (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

Each generation, I suppose, has its favorite fictional Tough Guys. For my parents, it may have been Bogart and The Duke. For me, they've been Clint, Bruce, and Mel on the Big Screen, and the literary British spy Quiller. However, in the past couple of years, Jack Reacher has arrived on the killing fields. And he's perhaps tougher, certainly smarter, than any who've gone before.

A former Army major assigned to the Military Police, Jack has been aimlessly roaming the United States through several novels, and attracting big trouble in each one. In ECHO BURNING, he's hitchhiked into sunburnt West Texas where he's given a ride by Carmen Greer, who's cruising the highways on the lookout for a Tough Guy. Carmen lives with her young daughter, Ellie, on an arid ranch with her hateful brother-in-law and mother-in-law while her husband, Sloop, serves time in a federal pen for tax evasion. According to the story Carmen spins, her spouse had been viciously beating her for years. Since Sloop is due to be released in forty-eight hours, Carmen expects the beatings to begin anew, especially since she was the one that ratted on Sloop to the IRS. Will Reacher kill him for her? No? Well, will he at least teach her how to shoot the dainty pistol she's purchased? (In the meantime, what's with that team of three professional assassins circling the ranch unbeknownst to all? Jack may discover his hands full.)

All those other Tough Guys I mentioned are smart, but not so much that they don't sporadically get beaten up and kicked silly by the Bad Guys. But not Reacher - nobody gets the drop on him. When the reader sees a violent confrontation looming, he almost feels sorry for the villains for the World of Hurt in which they'll soon find themselves. By his own admission, Jack's a hard man who likes cockroaches better than the men (and women) he's sometimes forced to exterminate.

Reacher is endlessly fascinating. Having gone from one Army post to another, first as an Army brat and then on his own as an MP officer, he's never known a permanent home. So, now he chooses to live as a near-vagrant, shunning commitment to material things and the occasional interesting woman. He travels only with testosterone and a toothbrush, buying cheap clothes to wear and discard as he goes. He's educated, intelligent and gentlemanly, but excruciatingly asocial (as opposed to antisocial, which he's not) and heroically ignorant about how a "normal" life - wife, house, mortgage, kids, dog, 9 to 5, and Lexus - is lived. This is a man whom all you single ladies out there would love the chance to improve. (Don't cave, Jack! Be a role model for the rest of us New Age men pining to be free!)

Hey, all you other Tough Guys of lore and legend, move aside and make room for a Real Man.

The review title may seem a contradiction but the sheer charisma of Lee Child's writing and characterisation allows the reader to wallow in the faintly absurd and come out the other side wishing that the book was twice the length. Let me explain.
Firstly, Jack Reacher is, was rather, a military policeman. At the risk of offending military police out there, who do a difficult and often dangerous job, theirs is not the world of CSI or Law and Order Special Homicide squads. 90% of their weeks work involves petty theft, drunk squaddies and mindless violence. Jack Reacher, whilst being the hardest man in the U.S. and the best shot, also manages to have the sort of investigative techinique that can only mean he was the illegitimate love-child of Hercule Poirot and Angela Lansbury.
Let me promise you, he didnt learn that in the M.P.'s.

The thing is though, and this is where Child is on an absolute winner....it doesnt matter. We WANT Reacher to be that ridiculously good, we need him to be that good, because in this day and age, if ever, we need our heroes to be bigger and better than anything that life can throw at them.
These books roll along at an incredible pace leaving the reader desperate to see what happens on the next page but reluctant to turn it as that brings us one step closer to the end.
A trimuphant return for Child and Reacher.

Keep a cool drink nearby as you read Echo Burning. Lee Child takes the reader into the unbearable heat of Echo, Texas as Jack Reacher tries to help a beautiful woman and her six-year-old daughter. Reacher has to sort through a web of truth, lies, and half-truths. Just when he has everything figured out, all the evidence points to different suspects and motives, and the closer Reacher gets to the truth the more his own life is at stake. Echo Burning is suspenseful from the first page until the spectacular climax. The biggest problem I had with the book was trying to put it down long enough to sleep.