61 Hours by Lee Child

Val Penny ♦ April 8, 2015 ♦ Leave a comment

Lee Child is the pseudonym of James Grant, the British author born in Coventry, England 29, October, 1954. He began writing his series of novels featuring his character, former US military policeman, Jack Reacher, when he was made redundant at the age of 40. I enjoy Lee Child’s books.It is my husband who introduced them to me in the first place.  Several of them are reviewed on this site: The Affair https://bookreviewstoday.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/the-affair-by-lee-child/,  ‎ Never Go Back https://bookreviewstoday.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/never-go-back-by-lee-child/ and Worth Dying For https://bookreviewstoday.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/worth-dying-for-by-lee-child/. 61 Hours was no exception. I borrowed it from my husband who had found it in a local charity shop. 61 Hours  is the fourteenth book in that Jack Reacher series written by Lee Child. It was published on 18 March 2010 both in the UK and in the USA.

In 61 Hours, Jack Reacher is on a bus that veers and crashes in a snowstorm near Bolton, a small town in South Dakota which houses one of the biggest prisons in the country. This places great demands on law enforcement resources. Jack is forced, by the weather and the broken down bus to stay on for a few days in Bolton. He soon gets drawn into various affairs and crime in the little town, the biggest of which is a forthcoming drugs trial. The trial involves a leader of a biker gang, who has been detained on a drug transaction charge. The chief witness, a woman, is in severe jeopardy, as the drug mafia does not want her to appear in court against them. The local police is inexperienced and desperately in need of help, so they hand over the task of protecting the woman to Jack. So, Reacher’s immediate problem is keeping a flinty old lady alive after she witnesses a drug deal that implicates the minions of a nasty villain. This novel by Lee Child describes each event hour by hour which actually creates so much curiosity for the ending that it becomes difficult to keep the book down. The tension in the novel escalates with each hour.

The author embeds an almost literal ticking clock in every chapter, ending each one with the reminder that there are “X hours to go.” It is an obvious device that it is like the magician showing you how the trick is done. Still it works and the readers still gasp and chuckle with delight as they see the trick pulled off. There is a secret hidden beneath the snowbound wastes near Bolton, South Dakota and it is one that the villain is willing to kill for.

I found 61 Hours a really exciting book and  it was hard to put down so I read it very quickly. I highly recommend yet another book by Lee Child to you.

Valerie Penny