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Persuader[PERSUADER][Mass Market Paperback]
Persuader[A Jack Reacher Novel] [PERSUADER] [Mass Market Paperback]
Mass Market Paperback
Published May 1, 2009
11 people want to read
About the author
Lee Child
448 books34.4k followersLee Child was born October 29th, 1954 in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended. He went to law school 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 British TV's "golden age." During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker. But he was fired in 1995 at the age of 40 as a result of corporate restructuring. Always a voracious reader, he decided to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis and bought six dollars' worth of paper and pencils and sat down to write a book, Killing Floor, the first in the Jack Reacher series.
Killing Floor was an immediate success and launched the series which has grown in sales and impact with every new installment. The first Jack Reacher movie, based on the novel One Shot and starring Tom Cruise and Rosamund Pike, was released in December 2012.
Lee has three homes—an apartment in Manhattan, a country house in the south of France, and whatever airplane cabin he happens to be in while traveling between the two. In the US he drives a supercharged Jaguar, which was built in Jaguar's Browns Lane plant, thirty yards from the hospital in which he was born.
Lee spends his spare time reading, listening to music, and watching the Yankees, Aston Villa, or Marseilles soccer. He is married with a grown-up daughter. He is tall and slim, despite an appalling diet and a refusal to exercise.
Killing Floor was an immediate success and launched the series which has grown in sales and impact with every new installment. The first Jack Reacher movie, based on the novel One Shot and starring Tom Cruise and Rosamund Pike, was released in December 2012.
Lee has three homes—an apartment in Manhattan, a country house in the south of France, and whatever airplane cabin he happens to be in while traveling between the two. In the US he drives a supercharged Jaguar, which was built in Jaguar's Browns Lane plant, thirty yards from the hospital in which he was born.
Lee spends his spare time reading, listening to music, and watching the Yankees, Aston Villa, or Marseilles soccer. He is married with a grown-up daughter. He is tall and slim, despite an appalling diet and a refusal to exercise.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 20, 2025
The novel opens with a dramatic triple axel, double toe loop, reverse spin, and a bonus layer of béchamel: Jack Reacher kills a police officer. Granted, he does so inadvertently while rescuing a young man from would-be abductors, but still—goddammit—Jack Reacher does not make mistakes, any more than raindrops fall upward. He never shoots the wrong man, not even if—hypothetically speaking—he had a nail lodged in his cranium (which, incidentally, did happen once upon a time, though not in this particular instance).
What in heaven's name has gone wrong with this universe? And, as if this were not calamitous enough, Reacher abandons the corpse and flees the scene with the would-be abductee in a van filled with pirated CDs (fortunately for him, he is not dark-skinned, lest some cop spot him mid-chorus). O Gods of Olympus, the world is thoroughly inverted: soon we shall be defecating through our mouths, and Time magazine will name Hitler ‘Man of the Year’—oh wait, it already did (1938).
Right, enough digression—time to proceed to the action.
Jack Reacher has taken on an undercover assignment, albeit in a freelance capacity, for two reasons: first, because a scoundrel murdered a promising young military police officer a decade ago (admittedly not the most original of motives, but we’ve encountered worse). Reacher, in an uncharacteristically self-restrained moment, abstained from sleeping with her—apologies, there's no less macho way to phrase that; we are, after all, discussing Reacher—in order not to derail her career trajectory. The second reason? Teresa. Who is Teresa? Of negligible importance narratively, but she has been kidnapped by the very same scoundrel who was supposed to be long deceased—having, a decade earlier, received two bullets to the skull from Reacher, who was functioning at the time as judge, jury, and executioner (he is not one for delegation; his management style is, shall we say, centralised).
SPOILER ALERT: Teresa is destined to be sold to swarthy men with dietary restrictions regarding pork.
SPOILER ALERT 2: The book operates within its usual register of mediocrity, but concludes on a particularly dismal narrative note. When one walks into a room soaked in the same waters one leapt into minutes earlier to escape an adversary (only to find said adversary once again before one) and utters, "I'm back," average rader expects something rather more theatrical to justify the line. Pressing a chisel into his skull, frankly, feels inadequate. (It’s akin to twisting the neighbour’s pigtails while shouting, “So you were the one who hung the laundry on the rooftop?!”) Had Reacher blown up the entire house while walking away without so much as a backward glance, I would have been far more appeased.
Truthfully, I do not know why I persist with this series, as the themes it traffics in are far removed from my literary predilections. And yet, I must confess, its sheer brainlessness offers a certain relief. One needn’t think—Reacher does the thinking for you. The moment he senses a gun aimed in his direction, within 7 nanoseconds he has calculated 27 possible countermeasures and selected the optimal one.
What in heaven's name has gone wrong with this universe? And, as if this were not calamitous enough, Reacher abandons the corpse and flees the scene with the would-be abductee in a van filled with pirated CDs (fortunately for him, he is not dark-skinned, lest some cop spot him mid-chorus). O Gods of Olympus, the world is thoroughly inverted: soon we shall be defecating through our mouths, and Time magazine will name Hitler ‘Man of the Year’—oh wait, it already did (1938).
Right, enough digression—time to proceed to the action.
Jack Reacher has taken on an undercover assignment, albeit in a freelance capacity, for two reasons: first, because a scoundrel murdered a promising young military police officer a decade ago (admittedly not the most original of motives, but we’ve encountered worse). Reacher, in an uncharacteristically self-restrained moment, abstained from sleeping with her—apologies, there's no less macho way to phrase that; we are, after all, discussing Reacher—in order not to derail her career trajectory. The second reason? Teresa. Who is Teresa? Of negligible importance narratively, but she has been kidnapped by the very same scoundrel who was supposed to be long deceased—having, a decade earlier, received two bullets to the skull from Reacher, who was functioning at the time as judge, jury, and executioner (he is not one for delegation; his management style is, shall we say, centralised).
SPOILER ALERT: Teresa is destined to be sold to swarthy men with dietary restrictions regarding pork.
SPOILER ALERT 2: The book operates within its usual register of mediocrity, but concludes on a particularly dismal narrative note. When one walks into a room soaked in the same waters one leapt into minutes earlier to escape an adversary (only to find said adversary once again before one) and utters, "I'm back," average rader expects something rather more theatrical to justify the line. Pressing a chisel into his skull, frankly, feels inadequate. (It’s akin to twisting the neighbour’s pigtails while shouting, “So you were the one who hung the laundry on the rooftop?!”) Had Reacher blown up the entire house while walking away without so much as a backward glance, I would have been far more appeased.
Truthfully, I do not know why I persist with this series, as the themes it traffics in are far removed from my literary predilections. And yet, I must confess, its sheer brainlessness offers a certain relief. One needn’t think—Reacher does the thinking for you. The moment he senses a gun aimed in his direction, within 7 nanoseconds he has calculated 27 possible countermeasures and selected the optimal one.
March 10, 2024
4.5 stars!! Jack Reacher never disappoints
August 29, 2025
took me at least half the book to really get into the story
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews