SBD tough guy edition

I'm reluctant to post because it'll push our NEW BOOK down. For some reason, book releases and my books out there have become more exciting again. I wish to cradle the precioussssss excitement of hey! look! People! Look! A book! I helped write it! A BOOK!

But tradition is important too, and it's Monday. SBD, bitches.

I read a book -- or rather, I listened to one. It was my very first Lee Child Reacher book. Number five in the series, but I wasn't lost, which is great. I do like Reacher and I've decided he can get away with being a laconic killing machine because he doesn't get all angsty. The introspection is about as much as you'd expect from any normal sort of a person. So his life is basically like any0ne else's except he's nothing like anyone else.

When he beats a guy up, that guy stays DOWN. On the FLOOR, nearly dead. No gloating on Reacher's part because beating the shit out of people is what he does. You got a problem with that? Not his problem.

Finally a character who doesn't lie awake worrying about all the bad guys he's put down. He's fine with who he is. The way he wanders without roots works for me. For instance his justification for buying new clothes rather than washing the old is one of the greatest things I've read in weeks. Hey, he says to himself, thirty bucks every few days is better than paying for a washing machine and dryer and a house and taxes.

I think I like his "so what?" attitude because I'd just finished listening to a standard cereal killer book and man, I'm getting tired of the anonymous killer's over-the-top POV in those books. There's always scenes that show how much he lurrrrrrves doing the killing and later on we learn how it all started when X parent did Y to him. BTDT

The loving description of the deaths is like porn. Those passages make me think whoa mama, this is skanky beyond any menage I've read. Of course the hero is better, stronger, faster etc, and the serial guy bites it in the end, so it's all okay morally. But still. The killing is vivid and I don't mean entirely yucky vivid either.

The serial man is always good at his MO too. I guess that's to make the killer a bigger threat and scarier, but then he's made intriguing, too. Just once I'd like to read about an incompetent overweight smelly serial killer who screws up the job.

Back to my man, Reacher. There were a couple of things that annoyed me about the book. The phrase "Reacher [or someone else] said nothing." was repeated a gazillion times and only a couple of times did I think all those "Reacher said nothing"s add up effectively to fit the scene of someone blabbing and him staying mum. Otherwise it felt like a "rosy fingers of dawn" moment, inserting a place-holder phrase that doesn't add much.

There was the lines about how "they'd be more likely to win the lottery than meet another car on that road" used twice. Once was more than enough. Aaand I'd guessed the bad guy almost at once. AND some of the language was simplistic and clunky rather than simplistic and elegant. But that's not really a lot of complaining on my part. It looks like I'm whining so I figure I should point out those are nit picks.

The way he kept asking the kid "are you ok?" make me laugh out loud. I immediately signed up for the next book in the series. (It's from the library, of course.) I have to wait and I don't wanna.

Wait. Hey. Of course, it just occurred to me that I read these after a long Miles Vorkosigan glom (yay for more Miles! I have to actually BUY the next few books which is a wrench, but I'm doing it) so it would have to be better than great to impress me. God, I love those Miles books. Thanks, JMC for recommending them.