Personal

ditto A Wanted Man (tee hee)

Jeez! Did this novel really take a year to write? I read it in an afternoon and an evening. Hardly even qualifies as a thriller. Think of Personal as the yearly episode of your aunties favourite soap. Yes. It's that mediocre. Featuring the safest baddies in the world...the US secret services. Yawn. This novel seems to be written totally to be made into a nice nice tv movie....for the lifetime channel. Of course I bought it ... and I'll buy the next one. But there won't be many new (or younger) fans for the Jack Reacher series. Shame really. I so wanted either Bennet or Nice to turn out to be traitors. Just for the sake of making the story a bit interesting. The Plot. A sniper has set his sights on taking out World Leaders at the G8 Summit. And Jack has to stop him. Except it never gets to any kind of tension. Day of the Jackal is a more exciting read from 40 years ago. And as Reacher himself points out, the G8 doesn't include the Chinese. Now that might have made an interesting story. Most of the supporting characters are just shallow stereotypes...the serbs, the russian, the brit and the girl. Do people read Reacher for the kills? I wonder. Actually Casey Nice has the best kill...the shard of glass in the throat...but it happens off the page. The really boring stuff...all the detail about Reacher's plane flight from Seattle to Pope Field. All that dreariness about travelling around London...Chingford, Romford, Barking.  Irrelevant minutiae about irrelevant people. Pure padding.

What a weird success the Reacher novels are. Even one of my faves, Gone Tomorrow, if I remember rightly, had no real reason of why that poor woman was being blackmailed. The photo McGuffin.

Oh well. Next year another review. Unless I decide to re-read any of the previously published Reacher novels.

btw I've lost my Kindle..somewhere. So I had to download Personal using the Kindle app on my android...wireless like. It took about 3 seconds and was a perfect read. Fantastic.