22. 61 Hours - Lee Child

Jack Reacher #14

audio read by Dick Hill

11 discs: 13 hours

2010. Random House Audio

383 pgs.

Written for adults

Finished June 7, 2013, on the road between Tucson and Dallas, TX

Goodreads Rating: 4.03

My Rating: 3.5 (It was very good)

Acquired: Paperback Books Swap (PBS)

Setting: Bolton, SD during a frigid blizzard

Goodreads:  Sixty-one hours. Not a minute to spare. A tour bus crashes in a savage snowstorm and lands Jack Reacher in the middle of a deadly confrontation. In nearby Bolton, South Dakota, one brave woman is standing up for justice in a small town threatened by sinister forces. If she’s going to live long enough to testify, she’ll need help. Because a killer is coming to Bolton, a coldly proficient assassin who never misses.

Reacher’s original plan was to keep on moving. But the next 61 hours will change everything. The secrets are deadlier and his enemies are stronger than he could have guessed—but so is the woman whose life he’ll risk his own to save.  In 61 Hours, Lee Child has written a showdown thriller with an explosive ending that readers will talk about for a long time to come.

My comments: I can't believe that right in the middle of bumper-to-bumper-Dallas-practically-stopped-rush-hour-traffic with about 200 miles to go I got to the end of this book.  I backed it up and listened again.  WHAAAT?  So badly did I want to get to a computer to ask a question or two. If I say more it will be to much of a apoiler!  The story started out slowly for me but got better and better - it totally kept my attention driving from Tucson through a huge part of the state of Texas!  And for the first time in many, many Reacher books, I figured out the back guy before he did!  Didn't take away from the story, though.

17. Mercy Kill - Lori Armstrong

#2 in Mercy Gunderson (SD) series
For: adults
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2011
paper $15.00
296 pgs. & Reading group guide
Rating: 4.5

I saw this at a bookstore and was able to get it from the library. I didn't realize it was the second in a series. I figured it out right away, though, because there are lots and lots of characters mentioned with no previous reference to them. You can figure most everything out pretty quickly, but there's an antagonism between the protagonist, Mercy Gunderson, and a guy named Kit that's never explained at all. You could figure out the plot of the first book by the time you finished this one.

After I read the first short chapter I put the book aside and decided not to finish it. I was really turned off. Mercy Gunderson is a retired special ops sniper who loves guns and ammunition of any and every kind. She goes out into a field of prairie dogs and starts picking them off, one by one, for kicks. How could that not turn me off?

When I did pick up the book about a week later, I was not enamored of this protagonist. A hard-drinking, looking-for-trouble kind of person who is feeling sorry for herself is not the type of lead character that makes you want to read on. But read on I did. The story kept getting more and more interesting and about a third of the way through I was hooked.

Mercy is working tending bar and bouncing, which keeps her from drinking quite so much herself. A close friend from her Army past reappears in her life, but he has been employed as a spokesperson for the oil company that is trying to build a pipeline in the area and she is greatly opposed to this. However, Jason had saved her life and she feels she owes him. They have a huge history. But then he is murdered and she has no idea why or by whom.

Mercy is also having a secret affair with the sheriff, Mason Dawson. (The author, Lori Armstrong, says she'd have Josh Duhamel play him in a movie.) He was her father's hand-picked replacement for the job of sheriff when he died. However, when Mercy feels he is not attempting to investigate Jason's murder, she decides to run against him for sheriff. Okay.

Investigations proceed. The federal government is involved. There are all sorts of family and ranch things going on. The townspeople are always around and in her face. There are bad guys. Drugs and drug deals. Guns. Shooting. Interesting story. And yes, I'll read the next one, which is currently in the works.