Worth Dying For by Lee Child

Val Penny ♦ February 9, 2015 ♦ 3 Comments

My husband is a great Lee Child fan and has read every one of his books. It was he who suggested that I might enjoy Worth Dying For. He was right. Worth Dying For is the fifteenth book in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. It was published in 2010 in the United Kingdom and in the USA. The book is the fifteenth in this series. It is written in the third person.

Happily, Jack Reacher survived the catastrophic explosion that ended his last adventure, 61 Hours.  So, now on his way to Virgina to meet Susan, the current Commanding Officer of the 110th Military Police Squadron who appeared in that earlier book of Lee Child’s, 61 Hours, Jack Reacher stops at the Apollo Inn, a fading motel in a rural part of Nebraska. He is out in the middle of nowhere of Nebraska and still recuperating from his injuries. He is attempting to find a ride to Virginia. In the bar of the motel Reacher overhears a drunken doctor refuse to treat a woman’s nosebleed. This totally unexpected incident propels Reacher into a major and life-threatening adventure.

The woman is Eleanor Duncan, the wife of Seth Duncan. He is a scion of the Duncan clan which holds that part of Nebraska in its iron grip because they run the only shipping company in the area. The husband, with his father and his two uncles, have a stranglehold on the farmers and other residents who inhabit this small and isolated corner of the world. They have intimidated and dominated the kindly folk all around. Reacher suspects that Eleanor’s injuries are caused by domestic abuse and coerces the doctor into doing the right thing, which quickly brings Reacher to the attention of the Duncan clan.  Thus start the events in the novel.

Once the doctor has treated the woman, Reacher goes looking for the husband and punches his lights out to teach the guy a lesson.
The villains in this book are among the best that Child has created, and they have a dark secret that is well hidden through virtually the entire book. There is also an old mystery that needs to be solved here and the result is another Reacher book that you cannot put down.

I know that Lee Child receives criticism for Reacher’s one-dimensional character. However, he writes a rattling good yarn. Lee Child is a pen name. The author was born, James Grant, October 29th, 1954 in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. He won a scholarship to the high school that JRR Tolkien had attended.

The author then read law in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theater he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a presentation director. During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker. However, he was fired in 1995, at the age of 40, as a result of corporate restructuring. He had always been a voracious reader,so he decided to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis.He bought paper and pencils and sat down to write a book, Killing Floor, the first in the Jack Reacher series. The rest is history! I enjoyed reading Worth Dying For and recommend it to you. Another book, Never Go Back by Lee Child are reviewed on this site: https://bookreviewstoday.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/never-go-back-by-lee-child/: and The Affair is at:https://bookreviewstoday.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/the-affair-by-lee-child/