"KILLING FLOOR" by Lee Child (B+)

This is Child's first novel featuring Jack Reacher, the hard-boiled military policeman who has left his lifelong military career to become a civilian. He chooses to wander through the country that he has served, and he happens to wander into the wrong southern town at the wrong time. We've certainly seen this before. Those backwater southern towns usually mean trouble, especially for strangers and outsiders. Furthermore, this placid little burg is too well kept for its own good, so well kept that it has to have hidden secrets.

This is a pretty impressive inaugural effort by Child in spite of its minimal character development in the case of the Reacher character. Child doesn't dwell on Reacher's career as a military policeman and a homicide investigator, so we have pretty much of a blank personality slate.

This lends a certain weakness to the story, since there are so many character holes to be filled. Any lead character like Reacher invariably comes off poorly developed in the first novel. Or, at least, he is better developed in the later novels after the author has had some time in his own mind to flesh him out as a more complete personality.

I have experienced this before in several other books of the genre by other authors. I usually have started in the middle of their canon and then, if the character and the stories have interested me, I have worked my way backwards in chronological and literary time. Almost without exception I have found that the first novel of a literary series is weak in character development, almost as if the character were still incubating in the mind of the author.

This time I purposely chose the first book of the Reacher series. There is a certain advantage to doing it this way. First of all, I get to meet Reacher as the author is meeting him. Secondly, if the first book is still a good read with this limitation, then it bodes well for all future books in the series. This book is a pretty good read, and Child has since published numerous other Reacher stories, so I have to assume that they keep getting better and better. I will certainly look forward to reading the next one.

With nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to answer to, Reacher decides to get off the interstate bus in Margrave, Georgia, for the simple reason that it was in this small town that one of his musical idols, black jazz pianist Blind Blake, lived and died at an all too early age some 60 years before.

Unfortunately, Reacher hardly sets foot in the town when he is suddenly arrested at the local diner on suspicion of murder. The charge is preposterous since he has an ironclad alibi, but Police Chief Morrison is still convinced that he is guilty. Jack Reacher has had a long career as an astute homicide investigator in the military, so he recognizes that he is being set up, but why?

Reacher is later able to convince Detective Finlay, a black policeman from Boston, of his innocence by his trenchant analysis of the evidence at the crime scene. The same with officer Roscoe, a comely policewoman a few years his junior. A cell phone number with the word "pluribus" is found hidden in the shoe of the murder victim, and that number turns out to belong to Paul Hubbell, a local banker, family man, and an upstanding member of the Margrave community.

When picked up for questioning, Hubbell goes into a state of panic and quickly confesses to the murder. His story is filled with so many holes that no one believes him, least of all another Margrave police officer who was with him the night of the murder. Why the false confession and what is it with this mysterious Kliner Foundation that is spreading money all over Margrave like it is fertilizer? 1997 by G. Putnam's Sons, 359 pages.