ONE SHOT by LEE CHILD

The books I had taken on a holiday up in the mountains were finished, so I poked around on my host’s book-shelves.

“Is this one any good ?” I asked, holding up a copy of “One shot”.

“Um, don’t know, can’t remember.  Let me have a look.”

Re-reading the enthusiastic blurb on the back cover, my host said, a tad dubiously “Yes, I think so.  Sort of forgettable, but good.”

And so it was.

I have to admit that I had never heard of Lee Child, and felt suitably chastened and humbled when I read a quote from Bill Clinton.

As in the Bill Clinton.

To wit: “I love Jack Reacher.”

Jack Reacher, in case there are any more un-Lee-Child-savvy people out there, is the hero of what would appear to be a torrent of successful novels.

“One Shot” is easy holiday reading, though rather too detailed in a bloke-y way for me, to be honest.

There’s a lot of technical talk about guns and ammo, so you get passages like the following :

“It was a Springfield M1A Super Match autoloader, American walnut stock, heavy premium barrel, ten shot magazine, chambered for the .308…It was loaded with Lake City M852s…”

You take my point.

It’s a good entertaining whodunnit with characters who all act as they should do – criminal Russian mafia, corrupt city officials, brave heroine, laconic hero – and the plot is clever, if a tad convoluted at times.

And the writing is as rapid-fire as the many bullets that feature in the novel.

“The man with the rifle drove north. Not fast, not slow.”

Lots of sentences without verbs, presumably to give a staccato effect.

A good holiday read.

No more, no less, as Lee Child might well have put it.

The paperback is published by Bantam Books and costs £7.99.

To buy the book right now, simply click on one of the links below. 

Couldn’t be easier. (Gosh, this Reacher speak is quite addictive…)