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Originally Posted by Baumi
Okay, here are my random thoughts about Killing floor:
Looks like my taste in books is quite different from most posters' here: I found the book impossible to finish. Literally. I stopped after about 45% on my Kindle.
It started out really well: I liked the opening arrest scene at the diner, and the next few chapters were decent, too. It started to fall apart for me, when the local police (who initially was portrayed as being very well-trained and professional) suddenly started making rookie mistakes (Putting two suspects for the same crime into the same cell? Bad idea. Not searching the car of a murdered police officer, because it doesn't seem important? WTF?!) and was generally unable to do anything without Reacher's help. I'm not just talking about the corrupt guys, I'm talking about all of them: It takes our hero to come up with the idea of calling a phone number written on a piece of evidence, a well-trained cop hands the investigation over to him and, of course, the girl falls for him immediately, simply because he exists.
There are so many missed opportunities for sub-plots here: If Finlay were a fully developed character, he could resist Reacher's attempts to run the show, leading to interesting tension. If Roscoe were more than the token love interest, her sense of duty might conflict with her attraction to Reacher. None of this happens - they are only standing around taking orders from Reacher. (Or, in Roscoe's case, lying down to have sex with him.)
Up to the point where I stopped, Reacher had yet to make a serious mistake, the kind that would get him into mortal danger. Any danger always came from the outside, and Jack would always fight it off easily. To me, a flawless hero who doesn't make mistakes is just boring. For an example of a highly entertaining hero who makes mistakes aplenty and still saves the day, read Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series.
There you'll also find something else I was missing in this book: Humor and irony. No, dead brothers don't call for guffaws, but a little self-deprecating can go a long way. Besides: The seriousness didn't even translate into drama: Reacher's brother's death doesn't get more than a few clichéd phrases out of the guy.
However, by the time Reacher did learn the dead man happened to be his brother (from a fax which he - a civilian who had just walked into town and had been a murder suspect - just took out of the police fax machine with many officers around him watching) I didn't care anymore anyway. The whole plot had started to feel like nothing more than a string of events conveniently set up to showcase Jack Reacher's near perfection in fighting, investigating and lovemaking.
Apparently, many people are able to overlook all these flaws and enjoy the book as mindless fun, but for me they kill the story and the fun - they are (wait for it) "killing flaws". (badum-ching!)
Seriously, though, even for a freshman effort, I found this to be rather weak, and I was quite surprised to learn that it had actually won the "best first novel" Anthony Award. Among the other winners are Patricia Cornwall and Stieg Larsson both of whom IMHO delivered much better quality in their first books.
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That's kind of how I felt about the latest Star Trek film (the one with the all new cast). There were so many holes in the plot and so many extremely unlikely coincidences that it became really troublesome, but in the end I suspended belief and didn't let it interfere with my enjoyment of the film. In the same way, many of those things you pointed out were bothersome, and the book would have been better without them, but I still enjoyed the ride. As someone else pointed out, Child never worked in law enforcement. Perhaps if he had that first-hand experience the story line would have been more believable; but it was still a heck of a lot of fun, IMO.