![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Bad Luck and Trouble Review
Mar. 25th, 2014 11:26 amJack Reacher Book Eleven - and the shine may at last be starting to wear off...
I still enjoyed Back Luck and Trouble, particularly to begin with, as it contained one of my favourite characters from the previous novels - Frances Neagley - one of Reacher's old colleagues from the military police. There was lots of great background detail about the two of them and their old unit, and the storyline of getting the band back together for one last tour (or rather an investigation into the murders of several of their members) had a lot of appeal.
However, but the time the story reached the final confrontation with the bad guys, it all just seemed a bit tedious for some reason and I was keen for it to be over so I could start listening to something else.
Also, there was one thing that really annoyed me. The plot partially revolved around Reacher being a "numbers guy" who constantly did weird arithmetic puzzles in his head, took great pleasure in working out the numerical qualities of any number he came across and was almost a savant in terms of working out calculations. Fair enough - but this aspect of his character has never been mentioned before - across *ten* books! Now, one of the frequent aspects of Reacher novels is that he mysteriously gains talents and skills as required by the plot (languages, sniper skills, weird background knowledge, etc), which has always been quite fun before, but it really grated in this one, for some reason, perhaps because he was continually thinking about numbers in the narrative, which he would have been in all the other books if the author hadn't suddenly made up this characteristic to fit this book.
Hey ho - it was still mostly fun, so perhaps I'll just take a break and come back to the next in the series in a few months, when I'm sick of YA dystopia...
I still enjoyed Back Luck and Trouble, particularly to begin with, as it contained one of my favourite characters from the previous novels - Frances Neagley - one of Reacher's old colleagues from the military police. There was lots of great background detail about the two of them and their old unit, and the storyline of getting the band back together for one last tour (or rather an investigation into the murders of several of their members) had a lot of appeal.
However, but the time the story reached the final confrontation with the bad guys, it all just seemed a bit tedious for some reason and I was keen for it to be over so I could start listening to something else.
Also, there was one thing that really annoyed me. The plot partially revolved around Reacher being a "numbers guy" who constantly did weird arithmetic puzzles in his head, took great pleasure in working out the numerical qualities of any number he came across and was almost a savant in terms of working out calculations. Fair enough - but this aspect of his character has never been mentioned before - across *ten* books! Now, one of the frequent aspects of Reacher novels is that he mysteriously gains talents and skills as required by the plot (languages, sniper skills, weird background knowledge, etc), which has always been quite fun before, but it really grated in this one, for some reason, perhaps because he was continually thinking about numbers in the narrative, which he would have been in all the other books if the author hadn't suddenly made up this characteristic to fit this book.
Hey ho - it was still mostly fun, so perhaps I'll just take a break and come back to the next in the series in a few months, when I'm sick of YA dystopia...
