Child's Jack Reacher series just keeps on getting better. This fifth adventure (after Running Blind) finds the ex-military cop in the parched desert of west Texas. While hitchhiking, he is picked up by a beautiful woman named Carmen Greer, an act that plunges him into a maelstrom of deceit, cruelty, and murder. Sloop, Carmen's abusive husband, is due to be released from prison, and she tries to persuade Reacher to kill him. He refuses but is concerned enough about her well-being to hire out as a ranch hand at the Greers' remote ranch, where he finds a strange, bigoted family hostile to Carmen and her young daughter. Within days of his return, Sloop is shot dead and Carmen arrested. To defend her, Reacher hires a newly minted lawyer, who, is female, gay, and vegetarian. Together they unravel the mystery, leading to an explosive, nail-biting climax during a chase through a thunderstorm. Highly recommended. [A BOMC, Literary Guild, Mystery Guild, and Doubleday Book Club selection.] Fred Gervat, Concordia Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Carmen Greer wants out of a bad marriage, but it's going to be tricky. Her abusive husband, Sloop, is in prison on an IRS beef; he's due out soon, and he knows it was Carmen who turned him in to the feds. Faced with losing her daughter to Sloop and his full-pockets Texas family, Carmen takes to auditioning hitchhikers for the job of killing her husband. She winds up with ex-military cop Jack Reacher. He won't kill Sloop, but he does take a job as a ranch hand on the Greers' spread in hopes of protecting Carmen. He never gets a chance. Soon after Sloop returns, he's murdered in his bedroom with Carmen's gun. She refuses to defend herself, even though Reacher is certain she's innocent. This fifth Reacher novel is brilliantly plotted, and Reacher himself seems to get more deadly as he slips steadily down the economic ladder, ever further removed from the veneer of normalcy that military life provided. Reacher is a one-man wrecking crew nourished only by the hunt. For anyone who thinks the hard-boiled genre is growing soft around the edges. --Wes Lukowsky

Smashingly suspenseful fifth in Child’s series (Running Blind, 2000, etc.) lands this British author’s rootless, laconic action hero in southwest Texas, where a femme fatale lures him into a family squabble that inevitably turns violent. In the kind of daylight-noir setting that Jim Thompson loved, ex-military cop Jack Reacher has his thumb out on a lonely west Texas highway when he’s picked up by Carmine Greer, the Mexican-American wife of bad-ol’-boy Sloop Greer. It seems that Sloop, elder son of a white-trash-turned-oil-rich ranching dynasty, is nearing the end of a prison term for tax evasion, and Carmine, whose body Reacher sees is marked with signs of physical abuse, wants Reacher to be her bodyguard—or, failing that, kill the man in such a way that Carmine can still hold on to her terminally cute six-year-old daughter Ellie. Reacher refuses but decides to meet the folks: Rusty, Sloop’s racist, charmless mother, and Bobby, Sloop’s stupid, pugnacious brother. Meanwhile, a trio of paid assassins is littering the Texas roadside with corpses, starting with Sloop’s lawyer, Al Eugene. In a set-piece as good as anything in Elmore Leonard, Bobby sends two ranch-hands to ambush Reacher at an Abilene roadhouse filled with 20 other cowboys spoiling for a fight. Reacher walks away without a scratch, telling Bobby that his hospitalized ranch-hands have “quit.” Child twists his increasingly hokey plot into a pretzel when Sloop is found dead and Carmine confesses to killing him. Reacher just can’t believe that Carmine is guilty and teams up with Alice Aarons, a leggy Jewish lesbian fresh out of law school, who trusts him with her car, her handgun, and her life. Child builds tension to unbearable extremes, then blows it out in sharply choreographed violence, even if his plot has more holes in it than the shirt Reacher uses for target practice. Book-of-the-Month Club/Literary Guild/Mystery Guild/Doubleday Book Club selection; author tour

Jack Reacher, the vagabond freelance lawman who never hesitates to stick his nose into private business, takes his lively act to Texas, embroiling himself in what starts as a messy domestic dispute before turning far more ominous. The rugged former army cop comes to the aid of Carmen Greer, who picks him up on the side of the road one morning outside Lubbock, then asks him to kill her abusive husband. Sloop Greer is getting out of prison in a few days, and Carmen fears he will start beating her again. Reacher declines, but agrees to protect Carmen, hiring on as a cowhand at the couple's remote ranch in Echo County, Tex., far outside Pecos. Within hours of Sloop's return from prison, where he was serving time for tax evasion, violence strikes. But the victim isn't Carmen; it's Sloop. He's found shot dead, and Carmen is arrested. End of story? Hardly. Most wandering heroes would move on at this point, but not Reacher. He begins taking a hard look at both Carmen and Sloop's past, as well as local history. What he finds ugly secrets, human suffering, political evil is repulsive to a man who's been around as many blocks as Reacher. Child (Running Blind; Tripwire) has developed a fine franchise with Reacher, who comes from the Robin Hood mold, but has enough personal quirks and moments of unusual insight to separate him from the pack. Set in a literally and figuratively smoldering landscape, this is a clean, infectious story that taps deeply into two troubling human emotions the psychology of abuse and the desire for retribution. Author tour. (July) Forecast: Reacher's fifth adventure a BOMC, Literary Guild, Mystery Guild and Doubleday Book Club selection is among his strongest, and should hook even those who haven't read the other novels in the series. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved