Six shots. Five dead. A heartland city thrown into terror. But within hours the cops have it solved. A slam-dunk case. Apart from one thing. The accused gunman refuses to talk except for a single phrase: Get Jack Reacher for me. Reacher lives off the grid. He's not looking for trouble. But sometimes trouble looks for him.
Lee Child's Jack Reacher thrillers always have remarkably inventive setups, and
One Shot is true to form. A sniper, Barr, kills five people with six shots and leaves a clear trail of evidence; arrested, he asks for Reacher. When Reacher was a military policeman, politics stopped him pursuing Barr--he cannot understand why Barr would ask for him and Barr has been beaten in jail until he cannot remember himself. Yet, for Reacher, the loner who looks at things differently from civilians, the story does not add up--Barr should not have got himself caught, should not even have fired from where he did.
Child is a master of the perverse solution to the set of questions no-one ever asked in quite that way before, and the macho yet sensitive Reacher is one of the more interesting series characters in thrillers. One Shot is a smart set of puzzles which strings the reader along to false conclusions and a sense of real danger. It also, like its hero, has a heart. --Roz Kaveney
