Nothing To Lose by Lee Child.

Thank you to the passenger who left this paperback on my coach as I have not read a Lee Child novel before but many of our drivers enjoy his books. Nothing To Lose is the 12th Jack Reacher story and sees him having an adventure in Colorado.

All these Jack Reacher stories are stand alones, you do not have to read them in a sequence. You can just read the odd one if that is all you want. The story is told in the third person and focuses very heavily on Jack, it is his tale. Something is not quite right about the small town of Despair and Jack is determined to get to the bottom of why the locals do not like strangers entering their town.

Lee Child’s writing style is different. Although his stories are set in America, because Lee Child is English, his spelling is British English which I find a boom as cars race around on real tyres! He writes in short chapters as there are 73 chapters in this novel, making reading session times easy to break. There is NO SEX in this story even though he takes a woman to bed! Lee simply writes “Afterwards…”. There are a few concurrent plot lines to follow but I thought why does Jack really bother? Things are thrown into the script in a tabloid fashion, things do not go too deep. There is not much character development as it is all centred around Jack. Everything is explained in the same way as a Drivers CPC course in the UK, lots of background as to why things are done a certain way. The pace of this novel is okay but I did feel as though I was on a training course completing modules to get a pass at the end.

Nothing To Lose was an okay read, it filled a space. I did not find it exciting or gripping. It is a shallow read and has about as much depth as a made-for-tv movie. It is quite a cheap read and I was not impressed. I do not know why Lee Child has so many fans and sells so many books that he is now onto his 20th Jack Reacher novel to be published in September 2105. I am glad I stumbled across this thrown away paperback because had I downloaded a Kindle copy I would have paid £5.01 which is far too much for a book of this quality. Nothing To Lose does pass my quality threshold but I can only vote it 3 stars as it is just an okay read. Having sampled his writing, I will NOT be in the market to purchase another Lee Child novel. There are plenty of very good authors out there and there is no need to pay more than £4.00 for a Kindle download - even a highly acclaimed 5 star read.

Nothing To Lose has 548 pages and was written in 2008.