Customer Reviews
Clint, Bruce and Mel are comparative sissies - By: Joseph Haschka, 11 Aug 2006 
Each generation, I suppose, has its favorite fictional Tough Guys. For my parents, it may have been Bogart & The Duke. For me, they've been Clint, Bruce, & Mel on the Big Screen, & the literary British spy Quiller. However, in the past couple of years, Jack Reacher has arrived on the killing fields. And he's perhaps tougher, certainly smarter, than any who've gone before.
A former Army major assigned to the Military Police, Jack has been aimlessly roaming the United States through several novels, & attracting big trouble in each one. In ECHO BURNING, he's hitchhiked into sunburnt West Texas where he's given a ride by Carmen Greer, who's cruising the highways on the lookout for a Tough Guy. Carmen lives with her young daughter, Ellie, on an arid ranch with her hateful brother-in-law & mother-in-law while her husband, Sloop, serves time in a federal pen for tax evasion. According to the story Carmen spins, her spouse had been viciously beating her for years. Since Sloop is due to be released in forty-eight hours, Carmen expects the beatings to begin anew, especiallly since she was the one that ratted on Sloop to the IRS. Will Reacher kill him for her? No? Well, will he at least teach her how to shoot the dainty pistol she's purchased? (In the meantime, what's with that team of three professional assassins circling the ranch unbeknownst to alll? Jack may discover his hands full.)
All those other Tough Guys I mentioned are smart, but not so much that they don't sporadicallly get beaten up & kicked silly by the Bad Guys. But not Reacher - nobody gets the drop on him. When the reader sees a violent confrontation looming, he almost feels sorry for the villains for the World of Hurt in which they'll soon find themselves. By his own admission, Jack's a hard man who likes cockroaches better than the men (and women) he's sometimes forced to exterminate.
Reacher is endlessly fascinating. Having gone from one Army post to another, first as an Army brat & then on his own as an MP officer, he's never known a permanent home. So, now he chooses to live as a near-vagrant, shunning commitment to material things & the occasional interesting woman. He travels only with testosterone & a toothbrush, buying cheap clothes to wear & discard as he goes. He's educated, intelligent & gentlemanly, but excruciatingly asocial (as opposed to antisocial, which he's not) & heroicallly ignorant about how a "normal" life - wife, house, mortgage, kids, dog, 9 to 5, & Lexus - is lived. This is a man whom alll you single ladies out there would love the chance to improve. (Don't cave, Jack! Be a role model for the rest of us New Age men pining to be free!)
Hey, alll you other Tough Guys of lore & legend, move aside & make room for a Real Man.
