Killing Floor by Lee Child

Recently I have read more lighter books than usual, book that don’t require so much brain power. I guess I have overdosed a bit on the heavy stuff and I am mixing things up a bit. Which feels like just fine for the moment. Though I have had two brainy non-fiction books going on the side for while now as well (Orhan Pamuk and Taner Akcam, see the sidebar).

Killing Floor by Lee Child fitted the need for lighter reading perfectly. It is the first book in a series of eleven that feature Jack Reacher, an ex-Military Police who wanders around the US leaving no trace. He doesn’t carry credit cards, ID or a driver’s license, pays everything in cash, and travels light. He grew up a military kid living on US military bases all over the world, so he basically has been a wanderer most of his life.

On the way from Florida to Atlanta Reacher makes a flash decision to get off the Greyhound bus near the small town of Margrave, Georgia. Within a few hours he is arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. In the next few days more bodies turn up and when it turns out that one of these is the body of someone Reacher knew, he stays in Margrave to find the killers. Throw in a cute police woman named Roscoe (we never learn her first name), and you have a pageturner of a thriller.

I found the first one hundred pages or so a bit slow, but I still got in the story enough to want to go on. Then I raced through the rest of the book, to the extent that I was even reading most of the way on a 100km ride in a minivan out of town. I usually don’t like reading on the road, because it makes me feel funny. I don’t get car-sick, but my body is not entirely okay with reading on the bus or in a car (when I was younger I didn’t have this problem at all and I would read endlessly on the road).

The writing was fast-paced (even in that first part of the book that felt slower), mostly because the story is told in first person singular, from the point of view of Jack Reacher. Often the text would read like his thoughts, half-finished sentences, subject missing. But it worked. Despite this POV, you don’t get to know Jack Reacher very well. You only learn about his past and his present thoughts inasmuch as it is connected to the story. But then again: who reads a thriller for character development instead of plot?

The story of Killing Floor is the kind that, if it were a movie, I wouldn’t care about, in large part because of the violence. It’s the kind of pointless violence I can do without and that I really don’t need to watch. While reading this book, I realized that coming across that kind of violence in a book is different for me. I still don’t think there’s any fun in it, and that it is rather pointless, but I can handle it better in print: I just read over it and kind of forget the details, I don’t picture it in my head with all the gore. Which is kind of interesting, because at other times I am rather visual when reading a book: sometimes I can see the entire book as a movie in my imagination.

Towards the end, I had a bit of a problem with the plot, the major thing being Picard’s change of role which left me with the major question: Why? This never received a satisfying answer. But for what it is, I enjoyed Killing Floor. It provides exactly what you expect from this type of book, not more and not less. I wouldn’t mind reading more of the Jack Reacher series when I come across them, but I think that in a way once you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.