61 Hours: (Jack Reacher 14) - Hardcover

Child, Lee

4.12

89,894 ratings by Goodreads

9780593057063: 61 Hours: (Jack Reacher 14)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593057066 ISBN 13: 9780593057063

Publisher: Bantam Press, 2010

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Winter in South Dakota. Blowing snow, icy roads, a tired driver. A bus skids and crashes and is stranded in a gathering storm.

There's a small town twenty miles away, where a vulnerable witness is guarded around the clock. There's a strange stone building five miles further on, all alone on the prairie. There's a ruthless man who controls everything from the warmth of Mexico.

Jack Reacher hitched a ride in the back of the bus. A life without baggage has many advantages. And crucial disadvantages too, when it means facing the arctic cold without a coat. But he's equipped for the rest of his task. He doesn't want to put the world to rights. He just doesn't like people who put it to wrongs.

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Review:

There was some excitement recently at the offices of Transworld, publisher of the British thriller writer Lee Child, who has so successful conquered America with his Jack Reacher adventures. Child usually produces only one novel featuring his tough ex-army action hero each year, but the latest book, 61 Hours, will be followed up with a speedily issued second new Reacher-related novel this autumn. 61 Hours -- admirers will, of course, have to have both. Sales of such Child novels as Gone Tomorrow have exceed 74,000 copies – and he continues his upwards ascent, singularly unimpeded. But the new book has Jack Reacher in the most extreme danger of his career.

South Dakota is shivering under an icy winter, and the roads are particularly treacherous. As a snow storm gathers force, the tyres of a bus skid and there is a crash, stranding the bus and its passengers. And if you think that this atmospheric set-up sounds like the perfect introduction to a Jack Reacher novel, how right you are: Lee Child's granite-tough hero has hitched a ride in the back of the bus, and finds himself (like the other passengers -- a particularly ill assorted group) facing the problems of surviving in sub-arctic weather. Needless to say, Jack is able to draw on more resources in such a situation than many of his fellow passengers. Some 20 miles away from the crash is a small town, where a key witness is being guarded against sinister individuals bent on murder. And another elements in this combustible mix includes an omniscient figure who is to have a crucial role in the dramatic events that follow -- even though this figure is many miles from the frigid landscape that Jack Reacher is marooned in.

All of this is typically suspenseful fare (in fact, the real surprise would be if it weren’t -- Child is one of the most reliable writers on the face of the planet). And there’s an ending quite unlike any other Jack Reacher novel you have read. Lee Child aficionados need not hesitate. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

"Child has somehow forged that magical grail: a new and believable hero. Reacher is strong, tall, principled and a quiet master in unarmed combat. But he's also a wizard at determining likelihoods, at extrapolating miniscule details and thus forming chains of inferred logic ...celebrate the achievement of giving us addicts a new and mesmerising fix, when we thought all the heroes had been written." (Euan Ferguson Observer)

"It is always a pleasure to read another Jack Reacher novel. A kind of highlight of the year, really. There is only one downside. It's all the other people hanging around your house saying things like, "Oy! Haven't you finished with the Reacher yet?"" (Andy Martin Independent)

"A storyteller who knows a lot about style...Watching the clock underscores the tension that Child builds so well. You do and you don't want it all to end." (Sydney Morning Herald)

"Explodes into one of the best thrillers I've read for ages. Lee Child is a Brit who has managed to becomes more American than most US authors...61 Hours is destined to do big things...Superb stuff!" (Independent on Sunday)

"This is the first of Lee Child's popular Jack Reacher novels I've read. I'd assumed they were merely the macho adventures of a boneheaded lone wolf:lots of guns and explosions and little to occupy the mind. Well, I was wrong: there's also an abundance of intelligence and surprise. 61 Hours is a first-class thriller...Child delivers it brilliantly." (Mail on Sunday)

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