About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

ONE SHOT
by Lee Child
Delacorte, June 2005
384 pages
$25.00
ISBN: 0385336683


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Small-town Indiana. A sniper hidden in a car park kills five people on their way home from work. The scene is littered with evidence and the cops are onto him almost immediately and it seems like a sure-fire case. But the guy won't say anything, apart from to ask for them to call Jack Reacher.

It turns out that James Barr and Reacher share some past history ­ and it's not one where they want to sit around reminiscing. Reacher, a former military policeman, pieced together the most complex of evidence to find Barr guilty of a similar crime in Kuwait in the 1990s. For a variety of reasons Barr walked, but Reacher warned him he'd be on his tail if he ever stepped out of line again.

So clearing Barr is the last thing on Reacher's mind when he is reluctantly dragged from the arms of a comely dancer in Miami to travel to Indiana.

If you haven't encountered Lee Child before, all you need to know is that Reacher is the man with the white hat, the medieval knight riding in to the rescue. He lives outside of the system and goes where he is needed to dispense justice, albeit with a trail of bodies left behind him. At the end -- and this isn't a spoiler -- he simply dumps everything and walks out again. The books are all present day US (and Child's a Brit, incidentally, and I've yet to hear anyone say they can see the join), but the basic idea has its roots in way back when.

That is absolutely not a criticism, by the way. Child writes well-plotted page-turners -- I read ONE SHOT in one, enjoyable afternoon. And where he has a huge advantage over other macho thriller writers such as Matthew Reilly is that he can create strong female characters.

In ONE SHOT Child is aided and abetted by lawyer Helen Rodin -- whose father is on the other side and doing his best to see Barr put to death -- and journalist Ann Yanni. To this motley crew is added the neat little cameo of lugubrious gunclub owner Cash, and the rather underfleshed PI Franklin and Barr's sister Rosemary.

If you're a Child fan, you'll pretty much be familiar with the formula. But hey, it works, so I'm not complaining.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, May 2005

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]