BOOKS: 61 Hours: Lee Child

May 20—Fourteen Jack Reacher novels since February 2022. Roughly one a month every month since.

I've never been one to read an entire series. I read all of the Ace "Conan" paperbacks when I was a kid but not in order, not at first.

I've been reading Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon books as they are published each year for about the past dozen years or so. Roughly the same for James Patterson's Alex Cross books. In both cases, I started with the latest book at the time without going back and reading the previously published titles.

I've known some readers who get on a kick. They start a series and read one book after the other, without reading any other books, until they finish the series then move on. That's never appealed to me.

I'm fine reading one Jack Reacher book a month. I'm about halfway through the entire series. Still enjoying them but I would have become tired of them if reading only one after the other.

Usually, the Reacher books are a good break after a couple of history books and another type of novel or two, as well as a couple of local books.

Reacher is fun. Reacher books are fun and interesting.

A vagabond loner, with a military background, he "falls" into different types of adventures across different parts of the United States from book to book.

In "Gone Tomorrow," the 13th Reacher book, he was in New York City dealing with sadistic terrorists.

In "61 Hours," the clock is ticking as he's snowbound in a rural South Dakota town with a secret and mystery that involves a local police force, a new prison, a federal witness needing 24-hour protection and a Mexican drug lord.

Lee Child, author of the Reacher books, counts down the hours, chapter by chapter, until the conclusion.

Reacher has his own code. One instilled so deep, he doesn't need to contemplate what he will do. Instead, he acts. He has an innate intelligence but given he's never owned a car or a house, or even more than one set of clothes at a time, he's simultaneously a fish out of water and at home wherever he goes and wherever he is.

The stories have suspense, an always different set of supporting characters and, so far, wildly divergent plots.

Reacher is almost always the same. Though Child imbues him with some small changes in attitude about his lifestyle as Reacher ages and is longer and longer out of the Army from one book to the next. But mostly Reacher is Reacher.

He is indomitable, though "61 Hours" calls that into question. One must have wondered when it was published if Child hadn't entered a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-style relationship with his character. Doyle attempted to kill off Sherlock Holmes but left enough of an opening to bring him back ... which he did.

But as already stated, there are at least a dozen more Reacher books since "61 Hours" was published.

Spoiler Alert here. Reacher has yet to have a recurring villain. and Child has introduced several great bad guys. But so far in the series, none of them have survived Reacher.

I'll have to wait until next month, and "Worth Dying For," to see if that changes.