CLEANING the GOLD: A JACK REACHER and WILL TRENT SHORT STORY by Karin Slaughter and Lee Child
















Published in 2019 by HarperAudio.
Read by Eric Jason Martin and Jeff Harding.
Duration: 2 hours, 4 minutes.
Unabridged.

The title says this is a short story, but the print version of Cleaning the Gold is 129 pages and I would call that a novella.

Karin Slaughter's Will Trent character works with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He is working on a cold case murder based on the activities of the very first Jack Reacher novel, The Killing Floor. Trent is looking for Jack Reacher based on a 20 year old DNA sample.

Reacher is working in Fort Knox and Trent assumes an undercover identity to
Pallets of gold in Fort Knox - they are featured
in the audiobook.
find him...

The book is all written in third person with Slaughter writing the Will Trent sections and Child writing the Reacher sections.

Lee Child is one of my favorites, but Karin Slaughter is certainly not. In fact, she's one of the few authors I refuse to read any longer. Just to compare, including this review I have reviewed 26 Jack Reacher books or short stories and just 3 Karin Slaughter books. This novella suffers from being mostly written by Karin Slaughter.

The readers were okay. One read for Will Trent, the other for Jack Reacher. The reader for Jack Reacher was doing his best to sound like Dick Hill, the reader that has read most of Lee Child's audiobooks.

In the end, this wasn't much of a story. There were amusing observations about Jack Reacher, but the story wasn't much. Reacher did most of the work and even then they made leaps of deduction that I couldn't fathom.

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5 (mostly because of the aforementioned observations about Reacher and the fact that I learned a few things about the gold reserves at Fort Knox. I can only recommend it if you are trying to round out your Jack Reacher or Will Trent collection. This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: CLEANING the GOLD: A JACK REACHER and WILL TRENT SHORT STORY by Karin Slaughter and Lee Child.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

SEPARATION of CHURCH and HATE: A SANE PERSON'S GUIDE to TAKING BACK the BIBLE from FUNDAMENTALISTS, FASCISTS, and FLOCK-FLEECING FRAUDS (audiobook) by John Fugelsang

Image
Published in August of 2025 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, John Fugelsang. Duration: 9 hours, 24 minutes. Unabridged. John Fugelsang is seemingly omnipresent on the cable TV news/political talk show circuit. He is a talented debater because he knows how to bring the goods to an argument, especially when Christian Nationalism is involved. Fugelsang had a unique upbringing in a super-Catholic household. Why was it unusual? His mother was a former nun and his father was a former Franciscan friar. They fell in love, had a bunch of kids, and made sure that they all went to church whenever it was having a service.  In a a lot of ways, this felt a lot like my childhood. No - my parents weren't nuns or priests. But, I grew up in rural setting where my Lutheran church was one of the centers of my life. Church every weekend, most of the holiday services, Sunday school, Christmas programs, church youth group, vacation bible school, and I worked at a church summer camp for fi...
Read more

The Best of 2025.

Image
This is a "best of" list based on the 84 books I read and reviewed in 2025. I do not focus on new books, so there are books on this "best of" ranging from being published in 1973 to being published in 2025. The titles are active links to my reviews. *** = Best of the best in that category MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY I acknowledge that it is odd that I found a 39 sports autobiography to be the best book in this category, but I found this to be thoroughly enjoyable read. The cover has a blurb from Playboy saying it was the "best sports book of the year." They may have been right - it is very good. If you are an old fan of NASCAR, this will be a fantastic read for you. *** King Richard I: The Autobiography of America's Greatest Auto Racer by Richard Petty with William Neely. A Paper Orchestra by Michael Jamin. Brian Epstein: A Life from Beginning to End by Hourly History. Our Subway Baby by Peter Mercurio. John Wesley Hardin: A Life from Beginning to End by Hou...
Read more

DRAGONS of SPRING DAWNING (Dragonlance Chronicles, Book 3) (audiobook) by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Image
Originally published in 1985. Audiobook published in 2012 by Audible Studios. Duration: 16 hours, 26 minutes. Read by Paul Boehmer' Unabridged. I distinctly remember loving this series 40 years ago and excitedly visiting my local bookstore to pick up a new one when they were published. I was an avid player of Dungeons and Dragons and a book series released by the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons was a guaranteed win. As the series continued to print new books, I kept on buying them. I probably owned dozen or so of them. Somewhere along the way I sold off my Dragonlance collection. I worked part time at a used bookstore at one point and they probably ended up there. When I found the books in audiobook format, I decided that it was time to revisit these books and see if they held up to my memories of uncritical acclaim. Synopsis: In The Dragons of Spring Dawning , the forces of the Dragon Queen are rolling up victory after victory. But, rather than confidently rolling up the scatt...
Read more

GRANT and LEE: VICTORIOUS AMERICAN and VANQUISHED VIRGINIAN by Edward H. Bonekemper III

Image
Originally published in 2007. Edward Bonekemper was a Civil War historian who came to the game kind of late in life - after he retired as an attorney for the federal government.  However, he brings his skills as an attorney to this book. Imagine a regulatory attorney bringing all of his research to bear in order to win a case by simply  overwhelming the other side with binder after binder of evidence. In this case, the evidence is almost 200 pages of appendices, endnotes, and a bibliography.  Bonekemper makes an argument in this book that Grant was undoubtedly the superior general when compared to Lee. In fact, he makes the arguments that Grant was the best general in the Civil War by far and Lee squandered his soldiers and his resources by going on the offense almost all of the time. Being the best general does not mean Grant made no mistakes. It does not mean Grant was perfect. Bonekemper acknowledges mistakes by Grant in every campaign and gives Lee his due from time t...
Read more

OATH and HONOR: A MEMOIR and a WARNING (audiobook) by Liz Cheney

Image
  Published in 2023 by Little, Brown and Company in December of 2023. Read by the author, Liz Cheney. Duration: 12 hours, 14 minutes. Unabridged. Liz Cheney is most famous for two things. Pre-January 6, 2021 she was famous for being Dick Cheney's daughter and a leader of the House Republicans.  Post-January 6, 2021 Cheney is most famous for being one of the leaders of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.  Cheney was one of the few Republicans willing to incur the wrath of Donald Trump and actually look into the role he played in the January 6 Attack. Cheney calls the book a memoir, but this is not really true. The book offers next to nothing about her childhood or her personal life. You know that she has a husband because she mentions that he helped her proofread various papers she had prepared for the committee.  Cheney starts with former President Donald Trump's election denialism immediately following the 2020 election date rather than...
Read more

LOVE YOUR ENEMIES: HOW DECENT PEOPLE CAN SAVE AMERICA from the CULTURE of CONTEMPT (audiobook) by Arthur C. Brooks

Image
Published by HarperAudio in March of 2019. Read by Will Damron. Duration: 6 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. Arthur C. Brooks was the President of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute from 2008 to shortly after the publication of this book in 2019.  Brooks is deeply worried with the present level of political discourse in America. Debates where the candidates just insult one another. Derogatory comments rather than actual proposals. Look at your typical Facebook political argument. Anonymous posters with names like "Trump_2020_Forever" arguing with "Trumpsters_Suck" and using terms like "libtards" and "conservacunts" while they insist that the other side is nothing but a literal bunch of communists and Nazis. This is getting us nowhere. And that is his point in Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt . What we are showing each other is contempt. He quotes a couples' counselor ...
Read more

The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat by Bob Drury

Image
A slow start - but don't let that deter you Published in 2009. Although I am a history teacher, I have to admit that I am woefully under-informed on the Korean War - at least when compared to our other wars. Sadly, I am not alone in this fact - there's a reason why the Korean War is called "The Forgotten War". Drury and Clavin start off slowly, in part because there is no context as to why the soldiers are marching around in the subzero weather in northern Korea. However, once they explain the purpose of this particular campaign in the war as a whole and show the reader a few maps I got a lot more comfortable with how they were telling the story and appreciated it a lot more. Marines during the Chosin Campaign  in the Korean War The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat is not a fancy history - it is told from the ground level perspective of the the Marines on the hill and is full of tales of bodily fluids, men too youn...
Read more

WILD BILL HICKOK: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
Published by Hourly History in November of 2024. Hourly History offers free e-books every week. Each of the books take about an hour to read and the smaller topics are really quite good. The series is good for things you want to know more about, but you don't want to read a 400 page book on the topic. There is probably a large book about Wild Bill Hickock (1839-1876), but I don't want to read it. This length made for a perfectly enjoyable and interesting read. Hickock started out fighting in the pre-Civil War Bleeding Kansas conflict on the anti-slavery side, worked as a guide, a hunter, a sheriff, and eventually ended up being shut in the back of the head while playing poker in Deadwood in the Dakota Territory by a man who was too afraid to fight Hickock in a duel. I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Wild Bill Hickock: A Life from Beginning to End . 
Read more

MOTHER NIGHT by Kurt Vonnegut

Image
Originally published in 1962 Mother Night  is one of Kurt Vonnegut's (1922-2007) early novels (his third) and the first that is not a work of science fiction.  The book features Howard W. Campbell, a defendant awaiting trial in Israel for war crimes in Israel. He is wanted for being a well-known voice for the Nazis on broadcasts that he made during World War II.  Campbell freely admits that he did what they say he did, but he does have a defense - he was working as a double agent for the Americans and was passing secret messages during those broadcasts.  The book sets itself up to be a legal thriller - will the hero of the book be saved? Can he prove what he says is true? But, there's none of that in this book. Campbell probably would have been the voice of the Nazis in the broadcasts no matter if he was recruited as a spy or not? He is just a self-absorbed author of plays that was way more concerned about bedding his German wife than politics or any "trivial" things...
Read more

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (audiobook) by Mary Roach

Image
Enjoyable - offbeat, funny, informative, thought-provoking Published by Brilliance Audio in 2010. Read by Sandra Burr. Duration: 10 hours, 27 minutes. Unabridged.  The point of Mary Roach's Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void is not the technical challenges of sending an object to Mars. We have demonstrated that we can send a probe to Mars, operate it and do a bit of exploring. No, this is about sending a human to Mars, a much more difficult proposition. Mary Roach deals with the following (and more) in her Packing for Mars : -We eat, drink, and create bodily waste. How do we store enough food to make the trip to Mars? -How do we deal with expelling bodily waste in a zero gravity environment (no toilets - everything would just float out!) -What do we do with the waste? Can you recycle it back into food? Who would want to eat that? -Can people actually live together in cramped quarters for months at a time with no break and not kill one...
Read more