By Lee Child
For a guy who believes life is "random," Jack Reacher has a bullseye capacity for landing at the center of carefully plotted conspiracies. In A Wanted Man, former Army MP (Major Jack Reacher) and now professional drifter with a penchant for solving other people's problems, takes a long ride with three strangers toward the kind of adventure only Reacher could solve.
Nothing random about that!
And there's nothing random about Lee Child's approach to writing: Reacher wanders. Reacher encounters "injustice." Reacher settles the score. Reacher moves on.
Nope, it's not random, but neither is it boring.
Child's ability to endear us to this six-foot-five-inch walking bowling ball speaks to his ability to craft believable stories with a descriptive style that meanders ever bit as much as his protagonist -- and keeps us turning page after page or listening hour after hour:
Reacher cannibalized his part-gone magazines and put a full load in his Glock. One in the chamber, seventeen in the box. Some of the brass ended up smeared with his blood. Which seemed appropriate. Some old guy one said the meaning of life is that it ends. Which was inescapably true. No one lives forever. And in his head Reacher always had known he would die. Every human does. But in his heart he had never really imagined it. Never imagined the time in the place in the details and the particulars. He smiled. (p. 523)
Yes, it is the particulars that makes Lee Child such an engaging writer (plot, characters, details, description, humor, action, adventure, and romance to name a few). I've read (listened to) all the Jack Reacher novels (except Better Off Dead which is in my queue). And I'll continue. Despite Reacher's belief to the contrary, his life and Child's writing remind me that life is definitely not random.