KILLING FLOOR (Jack Reacher #1) (audiobook) by Lee Child




Published by Random House Audio

Originally published in book form in 1997.

Read by Dick Hill

Duration: 17 hours, 47 minutes

Unabridged

I've been listening to the Jack Reacher series for a couple of years now, and I have been slowly working my way through the series in a random order. That's okay, though, because Lee Child doesn't write this series in any sort of chronological order. While Killing Floor is book #1 in terms of when it was written, it comes as #8 in the current lists of Jack Reacher books and stories according to Jack Reacher's chronological perspective.

For me, this book was particularly interesting because it filled me in on a frequently-mentioned event in Jack Reacher's life - the death of his brother Joe.

 Jack Reacher decides to get off of a bus in Margrave, Georgia on a whim and ends up under arrest for a brutal murder in this town's small warehouse district out by the highway where Reacher got off the bus. 

 Soon enough, Reacher proves it couldn't have been him and follows a pattern followed in almost all of his books - the man who is on the road and wandering in reveling in the fact that he has no attachments finds himself becoming attached to people and a cause. In this case, Reacher finds that this idyllic small town is not nearly as perfect as it looks and there is something very sinister going on...

 The first Reacher book is a solid start to a spectacularly popular series. Dick Hill reads this book and does a great job with it. He seems to "get" Jack Reacher and is a frequent reader of his books.

 I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

 This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Killing Floor by Lee Child.

See all of my reviews of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books here: https://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/search/label/Jack%20Reacher

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

KING RICHARD I: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY of AMERICA'S GREATEST AUTO RACER by Richard Petty with William Neely

Image
Originally published in 1986. Richard Petty is NASCAR's winningest driver, with 200 wins. He raced from 1958-1992. He won seven championships, he won the Daytona 500 7 times and is one of the few drivers to win at every track he competed on during the course of his career. In 1967 he won 10 races in a row (!) on his way to winning 27 races for the season.  He also won the very first NASCAR big time car race I ever saw at Michigan in 1981.  I was already a fan - and I was sure that he would win every race I attended from the point forward (he didn't). The Petty family raced in stock car races back when they really were stock cars - you could buy replacement parts at local dealers or in junkyards. They raced when you could drive the car to the track - but that was a bad idea if you were caught up in an accident and couldn't drive it back home. They got in on the ground floor of NASCAR, with Richard Petty's dad winning 3 of the early championships and Richard, his brother,...
Read more

LINCOLN'S GENERALS (Gettysburg Civil War Institute Collection) edited by Gabor S. Boritt

Image
Published by Oxford University Press in 1995. Lincoln's Generals is a collection of 5 essays written by scholars of various aspects of the Civil War. In this case, they focused on how Lincoln worked with his various generals, mostly the generals of the Army of the Potomac. They are organized in roughly chronological order. The first essay was very well-written. It was by Stephen W. Sears and concerned Lincoln and McClellan. The weakest, for me, was the second essay, ostensibly about General Hooker. It's focus was really the macho culture of the time that required men to prove themselves manly by exposing themselves to fire. It wasn't a bad essay, but it really was not about the relationship between Lincoln and Hooker. The other three essays were about Meade, Sherman, and Grant.  I got an appreciation for the difficulties of Lincoln's political position, especially as the election of 1864 approached. Viewing things from 161 years later, it seems like it was all pre-orda...
Read more

2 B R 0 2 B (audiobook) by Kurt Vonnegut

Image
Originally published in 1962 in  the magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction. Published in 2017 by Author's Republic. Read by Phil Chenevert Duration: 19 minutes. Unabridged. 2 B R 0 2 B is set in a future world where the population is kept at a strict limit so that the living can live in a clean and safe environment. When a new person is born into the world, someone must volunteer to leave because aging has pretty much been cured. The Federal Bureau of Termination keeps track of all of the births and deaths to be sure that the math works out. The phone number for the Federal Bureau of Termination is 2 B R 0 2 B - pronounced "two be or naught to be." The story is about a father whose wife is about to give birth to triplets. One of the grandparents of the triplets has agreed to die. Unless something changes, the future parents will have to pick out two babies to kill... This is an intentionally provocative short story that had a quick and brutal ending that surprised me.  ...
Read more

I FIND YOUR LACK of FAITH DISTURBING: STAR WARS and the TRIUMPH of GEEK CULTURE (audiobook) by A.D. Jameson

Image
Published in May of 2018 by Macmillan Audio. Duration: 6 hours, 58 minutes. Read by Holter Graham. Unabridged. A.D. Jameson is a student of cinema - not just science fiction and fantasy movies, but of cinema in general. I used the word "student" in the previous sentence carefully because he is not just a fan of movies, he studies the directors, the movements and the ideas behind the movies. Photo by DWD But, he is also a proud geek - a fan of sci-fi and fantasy literature and movies. Like me, he was really into those genres in middle and high school, moved away from them for a while during and after college and then came back to them in a big way when the Star Wars "Special Edition" movies were released. My own children do not believe me, but there was once a time when the mere sight of a Star Wars t-shirt or bumper sticker was worthy of comment. Now, they are everywhere. My family probably owns more than 20 Star Wars -related t-shirts alone. A.D. Jameson...
Read more

GANGSTERS vs. NAZIS: HOW JEWISH MOBSTERS BATTLED NAZIS in WARTIME AMERICA (audiobook) by Michael Benson

Image
  Highly Recommended Published in 2022 by Tantor Audio. Read by Gabriel Vaughan. Duration: 8 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged. Flag of the German American Bund In the United States in the 1930's there was a small, loud, enthusiastic, and growing group of Americans that were great fans of Hitler and the Nazi party. They were largely ethnic Germans and formed organizations that sported Nazi symbols and mimicked the big rallies that Hitler had in Germany. They also mimicked the overt antisemitic speech exhibited by the Nazis. The most successful of these was the German American Bund (German American Federation). There were a lot of small groups but there were two larger organizations with a different take than the Bund. The Silver Legion of America  (Silver Shirts) had a spiritualist take on hate. Father Coughlin  was a literal Catholic priest who brought a "Catholic" view on antisemitic hate and anti-interventionism from Detroit. He had a massive radio audience that was ...
Read more

The Red Heart by James Alexander Thom

Image
This is one great book. Originally published in 1997. The Red Heart  is based on the true story of Francis Slocum, a 4 year old Quaker girl who was kidnapped by Delaware Indians in the 1770s on the Pennsylvania frontier near Wilkes-Barre. (There are recreation areas named for her in both Pennsylvania and Indiana) A painting of Francis Slocum that is part of the collection at the Indiana State Museum It is also the story of her family's 60 year search for her across the Midwest and even into Canada. It is also the story of the relentless westward movement of the Americans and how the Indians dealt with it. The reader also gets a fantastic lesson on daily life among the Delaware and Miami Indians. If you're a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan you'll remember the episode entitled "Inner Light" in which Picard is "attacked" by the alien probe from the long-dead world that makes him live an entire lifetime among their people in his mind in ...
Read more

GHOSTED: AN AMERICAN STORY (audiobook) by Nancy French

Image
Published by Zondervan in April of 2024. Read by the author, Nancy French. Duration: 9 hours, 56 minutes. Unabridged. My synopsis: Ghosted is an autobiography of Nancy French. Nancy French had a career as a Conservative political columnist and ghost-writing for people in Conservative circles. She helped Conservative politicians write opinion pieces, helped them come up with clever lines for radio and TV interviews, and even books. She worked with such Conservative stars as Sarah Palin and Ben Sasse. She even worked with the Romney campaign.  The book starts with her childhood in Kentucky, including an awful story of sexual abuse at the hands of a manipulative youth pastor and how that sent her life into a spiral into she met her future husband while she was in college. Nancy French is married to David French, a well-known Conservative political columnist, commentator, and attorney. He worked for two organizations that defended the rights of Christian groups and Conservatives on co...
Read more

DRAGONS of AUTUMN TWILIGHT (Dragonlance Chronicles #1) (audiobook) by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Image
Originally published in 1984. Audiobook published in 2013 by Audible Studios. Read by Paul Boehmer. Duration: 20 hours, 0 minutes. Unabridged. Way back when, I read every book in this series from cover to cover as quickly as they came out. I did the same with at least two other follow-up series from these authors and, if I remember correctly, I read other books that were connected to this series - but not by the original authors. I proudly had about a dozen related books on my book shelf. That was 40 years ago. I sold those books along the way and had largely forgotten about them. I was reminded of them and I decided to listen to the audiobook version of the first book just to see if they were as good as I remembered. Synopsis: Krynn is a mostly peaceful place years after a calamity caused the people to turn away from the old gods. Cynicism abounds and the people worship new gods that may not after much comfort, but at least they didn't turn away from the people at their time of gr...
Read more

Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government by P.J. O'Rourke

Image
Originally published in 1991. I read the 1992 Vintage Books paperback edition. Dated but still has teeth. P.J. O'Rourke goes after the ridiculousness that is the federal government with his trademark irreverent style in his 1991 book Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government . Some of the commentary is dated (lots of talk about the forgettable 1988 presidential election with Republican George H.W. Bush going against Democrat Michael Dukakis. Also, the first one I voted in) but some of it is incredibly relevant. For example, the story of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHSTA) looking into the mystery of suddenly accelerating Audis 1n 1986 was reminiscent of the same problem with Toyotas that filled the news channels in 2009 and 2010. Perhaps O'Rourke's most famous line comes from this book: "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." (pg. xvii in th...
Read more

THE ROARING TWENTIES: A HISTORY from BEGINNNG to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
Published by Hourly History in 2023. Hourly History specializes in producing little histories and biographies that can be read in about an hour.  If you are pretty well-versed in the basics of 1920's America, this short history offers nothing new. If you remember the basics from your U.S. history textbook or if you watched a documentary on the topic, this e-book ill offer nothing new. The e-book repeats some of its main themes multiple times, sometimes within a few paragraphs of each other. I kept wondering if they were trying to fill space, which seems kind of ridiculous in a book with literal space limits (able to be read in just an hour). It also made me wonder if this book were written by an AI. As an example of what I was talking about, the e-book mentioned that people grew more accepting of LBTQ+ people in the 1920's. That is undoubtedly true, but it was mentioned so many times that it might persuade some readers that the 1920's were a very accepting time. I think it ...
Read more