He Needs Only His Wits and the Shirt on His Back
By Janet Maslin, New York Times,  May 13, 2010

61 HOURS
By Lee Child
383 pages. Delacorte Press. $28.

In “61 Hours,” the 14th, craftiest and most highly evolved of Lee Child’s electrifying Jack Reacher books, we find out about a metal desk in a musty old office that Reacher once occupied in Virginia. “There’s a big dent on the right hand side,” says the office’s current resident, the sultry-voiced woman who holds Reacher’s old job with the military police. “People say you made it, with someone’s head.”

Reacher isn’t one to boast about that. But he doesn’t exactly deny it either. What if furniture movers made the dent?, he asks coyly. What if somebody hit the desk with a bowling ball? The woman isn’t buying that. She speaks for anyone who ever tore feverishly through a Reacher thriller and marveled at its brainy, brawny hero when she rejects any reasonable explanation for the desk’s defect. “I prefer the legend,” she says.

Who doesn’t? That legend — of a tough, cerebral drifter, a latter-day 6-foot-5-inch cowboy with “hands the size of supermarket chickens” — has been so well burnished by Mr. Child that it has now taken on a life of its own. The character is so firmly established that there are certain things Reacher can be expected to do in every story: travel light, win fights against ridiculous odds, make at least one appreciative but quick wham-bam connection with a woman and stride away when the drama is over, never to look back.
Full review at NYT.



Footnote:
61 HOURS was  published in New Zealand, Australia & the UK last month and quickly dominated the best seller lists in all three countries following a hugely successful author tour. It is published in these markets by Random House under their Bantam Press imprint.
Read  The Bookman's review.