Jack Reacher Series

Persuader is the best. I love these books.

It's a crap series. They get bad, and fast. Killing Floor is the best one, and it's so good, I kept reading the series hoping that it would live up. It didn't.

There are better detective/thriller series out there, Casey. Michael Connelly/Harry Bosch, Block/Scudder, Barry Eisler/John Rain, James Lee Burke/Robicheaux all spring to mind.

James Lee Burke is a gorgeous writer.

I don't remember what book it was, but in it, Reacher's pecs were so awesome they stopped a bullet. He's a Mary Sue He-Man.

Edit: Google tells me that's from the third book Trip-Wire. They are dumb books. Well-plotted, but dumb.

A couple guys at work are/were big fans of this series, but they all agree that they have gotten progressively worse over the years. Never read a Lee Child book myself, but this seems to be the consensus.

The last two, GONE TOMORROW and 61 HOURS (part one), are a step up from recent efforts.previous ones. 61 HOURS was an especially fun read.

Agree that KILLING FLOOR and PERSUADER are the best.

There's no way the Harry Bosch novels are better than Reacher.

Another pulp series that I enjoy, although with some extra horror/supernatural stuff thrown in are John Connolly's Charlie Parker books. His non Parker books are good too.

They absolutely are. Connelly's batting record is better than Child's, too. I'm not saying he's never written a clunker, but he's got more good to great books in his series than Child does.

I guess if you don't want intelligent adult thrillers with layered characters and good prose and heart and engaging plots, I suppose Lee Child is better than Michael Connelly.

Here's the big difference: Connelly(And John D. McDonald, obviously Child's biggest influence) writes for adults, Child writes for teenagers.

Lee Child is a good read, as is Connelly and Harlan Coben's Myron Bolitar series( which should get a Gone Baby Gone type of movie treatment)

Maybe I wasn't clear enough: KILLING FLOOR is a great thriller, one of the best I've read. It's detailed without being overwhelming, it has an engaging plot and characters, and it fucking moves. It's a book that I still recommend to people looking for a good "beach read," because the novel is one of the best examples of it.

But Lee Child now? It's the kind of pandering, LCD-nonsense that gives all of us who care passionately about crime fiction and thrillers a bad reputation. It's painful to see James Patterson occupy such a prominent place at work (as is contractually mandated by his publisher), even though he barely writes his books anymore. Just like it's agonizing to see people eagerly devour Child, Daniel Silva, JD Robb, Vince Flynn and other fast-food authors like them while a steak like Don Winslow's Savages gets relegated to the bottom shelf of new fiction inside of a month.

Lee Child writes for cretins.

The Reacher books aren't very consistent quality-wise but I thoroughly enjoy the better efforts (Persuader, Killing Floor, The Enemy) and I don't let the terrible ones (Running Blind/The Visitor, which has the infamous murder-by-hypnosis twist ending) ruin the others for me.

I endorse all this, but I like Daniel Silva.

Vince Flynn makes 24 look like its written by the Huffington Post.

I don't really care for the Reacher series. I started with The Enemy and it wasn't bad but it was hardly anything special. Last year I picked up Killing Floor and I didn't like it at all.

Love Silva. I used to be all over the Silva/Flynn/Thor stuff but Silva is the only one that I still read. I might go back to Flynn since a friend of mine said his last few were pretty good.

I don't like Reacher because he's basically superhuman. You never get the feeling that he's ever really in danger due to how bad ass he is. Mind you, I only read one of the books but that turned me off.

Besides, Joe Pike would so kick his ass.

Casey, I wasn't saying you're a cretin, or even cretin-like (cretinesque?). I was saying that Child panders to a thriller audience that wants the equivalent of a "turn your brain off and watch the pretty lights" movie.

The padding in these books is insane. Why would I want to read the exact itinerary Reacher used to get to a diner on the side of a highway? Google Maps is not a fun read.

Also, I prefer knowing a character is a total bad-ass through his actions (like Parker) than by having the author constantly tell me he is (like Reacher).

What's even worse, and I think this is far worse, after the Child novels I read, I didn't feel anything, like I did after reading Barry Eisler's Killing Rain or James Grady's Mad Dogs or Winslow's The Dawn Patrol or Stephen Hunter's classic Dirty White Boys. The A-Team movie was dumb(Jack Reacher is dumb in an entirely different way), but I felt something coming out of it.

Of course the same can be said for Horror/Dark Fantasy genre (Kootz, Hamilton, Armstrong, those god awful "& zombies" novels taking up far too much shelf space in the high street).

When I worked in a book shop years ago, I managed to sell quite a few copies of God is a Bullet and Green River Rising , so I like to think I did my bit for the greater good there

Boston Ternan. Good job.

Boston Teran's a lying piece of shit. Fuck him.

Good read, though.

Somewhat off topic, but I'm moderately shocked that somebody else on CHUD reads Stephen Hunter. His books just don't seem to mesh with what I would consider the average CHUD denizen's taste. Man, maybe I should start a thread on those. While I like the Lee Child books well enough, even Stephen Hunter's worst Swagger book blows all but the three Reacher books I mentioned earlier out of the water.

I guess you don't hang in the B-Action thread. SHOOTER, and by extension, Point of Impact and other Stephen Hunter books, is known to come up.

Excellent. I'm a relative neophyte in the B-Action world (I have seen exactly one Seagal film all the way through, for instance) so I haven't ventured into the depths of that particular thread yet for fear of being found out as an impostor. Now, though, I have good reason.

J.L. Please, please see OUT FOR JUSTICE.

Anyway, back on topic. As has been mentioned, there's no way Child is better than Connelly. I enjoy some of the books, and Child writes effective, violent tense set pieces and comes up with crazy plots but the writing and characterisation in the Bosch series is so much better. The way Connelly writes about LA is so evocative. Child hasn't done anything like it.

Bosch has an arc over 10 or more books. Reacher just wanders around with his toothbrush. The closest he got to an interesting arc was feelling depressed that his old army buddies had done something with their lives while he had been bumming around for 10 years.

I think Barry Eisler's RAIN FALL had a film adaption as well with Gary Oldman. Got a Japan release and dropped into obscurity.

I haven't seen it. But from account I heard it's boring and terrible.

Any fans of David Morrell here? Rambo aside (and he did the novelizations for Rambo II and III), I liked BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE and its sequels.

I read all the Morrell spy books back in the late 80s/early 90s and liked them when I was young. I don't know how they will hold up these days. His Scavenger which came out a few years ago is a fun read. The sequel was pretty bad though.

And I sound like a broken record but I always recommend Wilson's Repairman Jack books.

Hunter, in his prime, was great. Dirty White Boys, is a masterpiece of a thriller and would make a hell of a movie. What's great is how human it is. The bad guys are scary, but not larger than life and the hero is a regular middle-aged fat guy thrust into the mayhem, while dealing with domestic drama at home with his wife and kids.

Point of Impact is also great, and was pretty badly mangled by the adaptation Shooter.

Ever see Eisler at a signing, tell him you know me from CHUD and then ask about that adaptation. It's funny. He hates it.

Anyway, Morrell is great and was one of the best writers to come out of the 70's, along with Grady and Parker and others. First Blood, an anti-war novel about Vietnam, is a masterpiece and pisses all over the movie. Book Rambo is so much more interesting and human than Stallone's Rambo and I liked the movies 1st Blood and Rambo. I keep wanting him to write an anti-war novel in response to Iraq. His horror novels Scavengers and Creepers are great too. I really like The Spy Who Came in For Christmas, and that was his attempt at a cozy.

Another great recent thriller from an old author is James Grady's Mad Dogs. Hilarious, angry, and heart-breaking. It's about a group of former CIA spies from different eras (The oldest is from the early days of Vietnam) who all snapped from horrible trauma's and are stuffed away in a CIA run institution. Their doctor is murdered and before they have it pinned on them, they break out and try to find the real killer. There's also a nice nod to Six Days of The Condor.

Black Light ties up Point of Impact and Dirty White Boys pretty neatly. Hunter went downhill fast after Time to Hunt, unfortunately. It doesn't take long to see the re-used plot pieces in the books. But go back to The Day Before Midnight for some vintage, cold-war Hunter.

I rather like Pale Horse Coming.

Yeah, it had some punch, but I wasn't crazy about some of the book's themes. As an homage to The Magnificent Seven it works ok.

I was at a thriller writer convention last month, and I was surprised how many of those dudes look like bankers and lawyers and male librarians. There were a few guys who looked like they could handle themselves, but it was kind of funny to realize how many of them were nothing like the tough guys they write about.

Anyway, David Morell. Nice guy. Incredibly short.

I think that Pale Horse Coming might work better for the gun nerd crowd (such as myself) than for most, because it adds more gravity to each of the old men if you're familiar with the works and writings of the men they're based on.
I'd chart Hunter's decline not as starting after Time to Hunt, because I very much enjoyed both Hot Springs and Pale Horse Coming, but starting with Havana. I liked the 47th Samurai and Night of Thunder, but both of them felt less like Bob Lee Swagger stories and more like stories that have Bob Lee Swagger in them. Winding back to the topic, I think that's the biggest weakness of the Reacher books: for the most part, any old badass would do. Persuader and the Enemy both rely on Reacher as a character with a past, which I think is why they end up being so far superior to most of the others in the series.

Re: the Repairman Jack novels. I personally never felt terribly drawn in by the overarching storyline of the cosmic battle between neutral and evil, so I tend to prefer the books that are more standalone. I think that The Tomb was great, because it managed to introduce a super-competent and badass character but throw him into something that makes him seem out of his depth without making him weak.

Winslow looks like an accountant(Or a mob informant on some of his book photos like Frankie Machine), but I've seen him shoot and wouldn't want to mess with him. The dirty little secret is that most crime writers are gay for research and fact finding. They are nerds, and therefore, fun to be around. They can talk craft and theme and character for hours if you let them.

Barry Eisler could kill me with his thumbs if he wanted to, though. John D. McDonald was also very much a badass. His life is almost more interesting than his characters. I write pretty dark stuff, but Lisa Lutz once told me I'm the least hard-boiled man alive.

I just read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (and saw the movie. A pretty faithful adaption). Maybe its just the Swedish Translation, but I felt its really clunky at part.

Lisbeth is an interesting character though. I could easily see her starting off her own franchise.

I don't think he's a bad writer, but we won't know how good he is until he writes a book that isn't Reacher, which he has said he doesn't want to do.

As someone else in this thread said, the majority of the books could have any hardass as the protagonist. As hard as he tries to make Reacher special, there's nothing particularly special about the character. Eisler's John Rain arc where he looks for his soul isn't anything special and is old as dirt as far as plots go, but Eisler did it well. Rain was unique because of that.

James Lee Burke often uses a line about how the bravest people he's ever met wouldn't catch your attention in line at the grocery store.

I've been to more than a few mystery/crime cons and Morrell has impressed me as the only fella who asked me if I was enjoying myself at any of them. One of the few writers who were given the gift of creative writing yet works at improving his craft after hitting it big. He's had a pretty tough life - the sort of pain which, under certain circumstances, may turn a good writer great. But Morrell was good from the start. The Saul/Drew trilogy is top-shelf; my favourite is Long Lost.

What I like about David Morrell is that he really diggs the Rambo movies Sly made over his creation. In fact when Morrell did the novelizations, he didn't even bother to try to retcon his first book.

First Blood is one of my favourite books. It all starts with Rambo as some homeless Hitchhiker and ends with Gas Stations blowing up and the entire town turning into shit.

Loved the way he alternates the Chapters between Rambo and Teasle's perspectives. Each of them refuse to back down and the whole thing escalates way way out of hand.