
The good
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Fast-paced thriller.
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A few OK action scenes.
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A few interesting deductions.
The not so good
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The writing and dialog aren’t as smoothed and polished as in the later Jack Reacher books.
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The characters, including Jack Reacher himself, doesn’t seem particularly well fleshed out.
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The coincidences that set up the plot are… a bit absurd.
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Some unnecessarily gory violence/torture.
Overall
It felt like Lee Child was still getting a feel for things, which makes sense, as this was the first book in the series. I actually had read two much later books first (One Shot and 61 Hours) and found those more polished, harder to put down, with a more crisply-defined protagonist.
Rating: 3 stars
Yevgeniy Brikman
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