Tripwire by Lee Child

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

My second run at a Reacher novel and I found much of what I found in the first: No editor. Well, Dell might have one around one around, but it seems they don’t get much involved with the Reacher series. There are hundreds of hundreds of unneeded words in this novel. It’s a great story, but poorly executed in it’s pacing due to the over writing. Basically the book is muddled. While Child explains nearly every move made by the main characters, it quicksands the reader to move on with the plot line. The reader really doesn’t need to know how the bad guy sleeps at night and the process of that. The reader doesn’t need to know back and forth banter at a ticket counter that had been covered earlier in the book.

Now, if Child were an outstanding writer and it was fun to see how he turned a phrase, my opinion would be very different. However, his writing is just good.

The plotting is what Child does best. I’d suggest he might think of teaming with another writer that might help reduce the excess. One thing ran through my mind as i read this: What a better job John D. MacDonald would have done with the book.

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