Excerpt from Lee Child’s Make Me

Survey question for you (answer in the comments): Who is your favorite thriller author?

[  ] Lee Child

[  ] James Patterson

[  ] Someone else…?

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules at Books and a Beat. Anyone can play along!

I love Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books, and just finished Make Me. It is classic Jack Reacher, sensitive yet hard-hitting, lots of tension  and clever dialogue. A fresh and intriguing puzzle. If you’ve read Lee Child, you know what to expect!

At which point the motel keeper’s twelve-year-old grandson ducked into the general store, to the pay phone on the wall just inside the door. He dumped his coins and dialed a number, and when it was answered he said, “He’s searching the town. I followed him everywhere. He’s looking all over. He’s doing it block by block.”

Lee Child, Make Me

“Why is this town called Mother’s Rest?” That’s all Reacher wants to know. But no one will tell him. It’s a tiny place hidden in a thousand square miles of wheat fields, with a railroad stop, and sullen and watchful people, and a worried woman named Michelle Chang, who mistakes him for someone else: her missing partner in a private investigation she thinks must have started small and then turned lethal.

Reacher has no particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, and there’s something about Chang . . . so he teams up with her and starts to ask around. He thinks: How bad can this thing be? But before long he’s plunged into a desperate race through LA, Chicago, Phoenix, and San Francisco, and through the hidden parts of the internet, up against thugs and assassins every step of the way—right back to where he started, in Mother’s Rest, where he must confront the worst nightmare he could imagine.

Walking away would have been easier. But as always, Reacher’s rule is: If you want me to stop, you’re going to have to make me.