Goodreads blurb: Killing Floor is the first book in the phenomenal bestselling Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. It introduces Reacher for the first time, as the tough ex-military cop of no fixed abode. Trained to think fast and act faster, he is the perfect action hero for men and women alike.
Margrave is a no-account little town in Georgia. Jack Reacher jumps off a bus and walks fourteen miles in the rain to reach it, an arbitrary detour in search of a dead guitar player.
But Margrave has just had its first homicide in thirty years. And Reacher is the only stranger in town. So he is thrown into jail. As the body count mounts, only one thing is for sure: they picked the wrong guy to take the fall.
——————
Although I quite enjoyed Jack Reacher, the movie starring Tom Cruise based on the eponymous character created by Lee Child, I didn’t quite get around to actually buying the books themselves until sometime last year, and funnily enough it took me all this while to get around to reading them as well, and what better place to begin with than the first book in the Jack Reacher series, Killing Floor.
As the blurb reads Reacher gets off a bus near Margrave, a sleepy town in Georgia and is making his way into town when he gets arrested for homicide, the first the town has seen in thirty years. Little does he know that this unfortunate coincidence has a deeper connection to him than he could possibly have imagined. And what’s worse little do the town’s residents know that their lives, as they know it, will never be the same in the future after the chain of events this arrest sets in motion.
Pretty soon Margrave sees it second homicide in thirty years and then a third one is also discovered, and Reacher finds himself embroiled deeper and deeper into what’s unfolding during his brief time in this sleepy town. Relying on his years of invaluable experience as a homicide investigator for the armed forces, and trusting his razor sharp instincts and chess-player like brain Reacher soon proves invaluable in the larger motive behind these homicides. What unfolds is nothing short of shocking and way beyond Reacher’s wildest imagination.
Without giving any more spoilers, suffice to say that the investigation that follows and the action that takes place in the rest of the book will leave even the most hardcore detective and homicide genre fans fairly breathless with the sheer scale of the plot and the crisp pace at which the action moves along. Not one word is wasted in this 500+ page book and for sure this plot provides a wonderful introduction to the character of Jack Reacher.
What I particularly liked about the book was that throughout the book, the author almost always uses unambiguous logic and hard facts to drive the action and doesn’t rely on coincidences or divine providences to bring up a sudden twist in the proceedings. That to me is the hallmark of all the homework that Lee Child did when plotting and etching out the characters and the narrative of this book.
In a nutshell, as mentioned before Killing Floor is a worthy debut for one of paperback literature’s most enigmatic homicide investigators Jack Reacher. A must-read for all fans of the crime thriller genre.
——————–
Click here to purchase the book from Flipkart [Link] or Amazon [Link].
