Ex-military policeman Jack Reacher is a drifter. He’s just passing through Margrave, Georgia, and in less than an hour, he’s arrested for murder. Not much of a welcome. All Jack knows is that he didn’t kill anybody. At least not here. Not lately. But he doesn’t stand a chance of convincing anyone. not in Margrave, Georgia. Not a chance in hell.

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How was it?

My first experience with Jack Reacher was the Tom Cruise “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” version back in 2016 and the trailers for the 2012 movie before that. So I was curious to see the book version.

It starts off very slow and methodical, just like how Jack Reacher seems to be. A quiet man who observes, analyzes, and acts accordingly. We are taken into his thought processes and see how he scrutinizes everything around him. It would be fascinating if the bad guys weren’t so obvious. Maybe the trailer for that first Cruise Reacher movie spoiled this book for me since the opening scene from the trailer seems to sum up this story.

Another striking thing about Reacher is that he isn’t willing or eager to help at first. He intervenes when he has to and when it serves him. He may be a bit selfish, but to me, he came across as a guy who just minds his own business. However, the reason why he gets involved in the case made sense but seemed a bit too coincidental. Too much time had been spent establishing that he didn’t want to get involved, so it had to be something big enough for him to join the investigation.

Although there is a small chunk that I zombie read*, I’m pretty sure that there are some plot holes in this book, an obvious one for me was the big deal that was made about Reacher not carrying any ID but he somehow took a plane and I don’t remember him going to get his ID or anything. The other thing that really doesn’t make much sense is how Finlay got his job because they needed an idiot for it, but there is someone involved in the scheme at play here who should have known that he was a competent investigator.

So there are a lot of nonsensical things in this book, but it is still entertaining. It never became a chore to read or boring for me, although I admit that I was zombie reading* some of it. It is a bit cliché for sure, but the investigation part of the story was good even though I would have expected it to be more action-driven.

Killing Floor is available on The Book Depository, Amazon, Audible and other book retailers near you.

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*Zombie reading: reading something without really processing any of the words on the page. One often wonders how they got a particular section, with little to no recollection of what came before, after zombie reading.