Killing Floor book review

Killing Floor by Lee Child
Series: Jack Reacher #1
Published by Jove on April 25, 2006
Pages: 424
Goodreads

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.

Killing Floor is the first book in the Jack Reacher novels and that series is one of the most popular that we loan out at the library, so I didn’t really need any other excuse to borrow it myself. The storyline was really interesting, I wanted to know more and I enjoyed the conspiracy element of it all. I actually really enjoyed it, I don’t know whether I was expecting to or not. It is definitely a little more masculine than the books I usually read, but it didn’t seem to impact my enjoyment of the story one bit. I quite liked all the violence and drama, the only bits I didn’t like was the romance, but you can’t have everything now, can you?

The main character and focus of this book is obviously the introduction to Jack Reacher. He is the main star of this book and you learn a lot about him and his background through the events that run through the story and plot. I think that there is a lot of potential for him as a character, and it’s definitely not something that has been fully expanded on within this book. The other supporting characters are just that, although they are well written and enjoyable you don’t end up learning an awful lot about them and you don’t get too attached to their storyline.

I think the best bit of Killing Floor would definitely be the politics and conspiracy that plays such a big part of the crimes within this book. I love anything that brings those in power into question and adds an element of untrustworthiness to all of the different characters. I think that is what this book does well when you remove all the different action scenes and the drama that goes along with that. If the rest of the books follow this sort of train of thought then I will be extremely happy with that.

The worst bit of Killing Floor for me was the way that romance and women were talked about throughout. There is a lot of description about each of them and it was always about their looks and he never really delved any deeper than that. When it happened for the third time I realised just how much it had irritated me the first couple of times. I wish that they could have gotten rid of that and then the book would have been an all-rounder.

I would definitely recommend Killing Floor, I can’t wait to move on with the rest of the series and learn more about the character and see where the next story ends up taking us. I think I’m in it for the long haul now and it might end up being one of my new favourite series!

Have you ever read Lee Child’s books? Let me know what you thought of them in the comments!