Jack Reacher walks into a small town in Georgia and is immediately arrested for a murder he doesn't even know anything about, let alone have anything to do with. As the story is told from his point of view, he's able to tell the reader a lot about himself by how he handles the situation.

He could easily disarm and overpower the police officers taking him to jail but he doesn't because he's innocent and this will all work itself out. In addition to a life in the military that's made him almost superhumanly strong and trained in, I'm going to predict, practically infinite methods of violent attack and defense, he was in the military police for years, so he also knows about police procedures and psychology.

So his confidence is understandable. What's not understandable is why, after 100 pages of being an ex-Army, badass Sherlock Holmes—he does the old deduce a complete stranger's life from his clothing and mannerisms—he's baffled when the warden of the jail tries to have him killed.

"I couldn't begin to figure it out," he tells us, but it's clear that this uncharacteristic cluelessness is simply there so this book can be over 500 pages long. There's been a violent murder that involved at least three people. There's a conspiracy involving a local rich banker. And Reacher himself has been set up and framed by the chief of police!

When the chief of police is lying to make you take the fall for a murder and then the warden of the prison tries to set you up as the next vicitm, this is a clear case of adding two and two together to get four. Your fake murder suspect gets killed, you get to say he did it, case closed. But even though Reacher has, until this point, known everything about everything and been way more than merely competent in every situation, this plot point, which wouldn't stump a child, is all of a sudden a baffling mystery to him.

And that's a shame because so far this has been a pleasant sort of spin on In the Heat of the Night, with an out-of-town Sherlock Holmes-type being falsely arrested for murder and then having to solve the crime himself. (Reacher's older brother is eventually introduced and he turns out to have some shades of Mycroft.) And the mystery part is pretty well drawn out, even though the reader is also frustrated by the old "character who could clear up everything by speaking a few sentences to the hero but just won't do it" device.

There are also the helpful "information dump" characters, complete strangers who open up and regurgitate huge amounts of information to help Reacher when Child just needs to get him somewhere.

Which is super convenient because Reacher is frequently making it harder on himself. At one point, he has no more leads. Just a dead end. And it's time sensitive. He only has a few days to discover what's going on. But then these two bad guys show up in town asking where Reacher is and, when they find him, start following him.

Well, this could be a lead, right? Get the drop on these guys, force them to answer some questions. Sure, maybe it'll be another dead end, maybe they don't know anything. But, hey, then again, maybe not.

But Reacher just kills them both without a word. I'm guessing author or editor or both decided there needed to be some action in this section of the book so a little bit of cat and mouse was thrown in.

To sum up, it's not bad. It's not very good either. But it seems to me that, like many an author, Child hadn't really figured it out in the first book of the series.

The biggest problem is that it's over-written, and in what quickly becomes a faux naif first-person voice. (In the second and I assume all other books, Child corrects this, switching to third person, and it reads much, much better.)

Killing Floor is over 500 pages long and could have been half that length if Reacher were a more consistent character and a lot less verbose.

Here's a typical example, one of hundreds of descriptive paragraphs, setting a scene that's neither important nor revisited:

On its own it might not seem like a big deal but this happens more than once a page. So much describing that it quickly becomes blather. There are five sentences about the path to this person's door. Four sentences about the door itself! (Or sentence fragments, if you want to be punctilious.) And it's like that all the time.

Here's a paragraph that could have been cut entirely:

All that could have been cut and we just skip to the next paragraph where it says they made some phone calls and confirmed his alibi. Reacher's done it a thousand times and we've all seen it or read it a thousand times too. It's a tableau of cliché.

Also, is that really the story she told him? "Yeah, Finlay and I started work on your alibi late Friday evening. We were in the squad room. It was dark but we turned on a couple of desk lights. We had pads of paper and cups of coffee. Telephone books, too, and we were looking up numbers and calling them while cradling the phones and chewing pencils. We kept our voices low and our enquiries patient."

You see the problem? Why is Reacher always yammering on so pointlessly? It's the text equivalent of empty calories. And of course for a lot of people, a book like this, probably the entire genre, is presumed to be junk food.

What's the point of criticizing the nutritional value of something like Doritos? The point is that Doritos could be good if they were made to be good. And if you like what you get from Doritos and wish that they were actually "good", you can find something better if you try.

Anyway, back to Killing Floor.

There's a real howler of a scene set at the Atlanta airport, which is wildly unbelievable even by the conventions of the genre. Child describes Reacher as "six feet five inches tall, and around two hundred pounds, all of it muscle". And yet he's completely unable to cope with walking against the current of passengers leaving a commercial airplane, despite his size, strength and formidable training in, well, just about everything. I'm five feet ten inches tall, about a hundred and ninety pounds, a lot of it not muscle, comfortable with a bicycle and a tennis racket but not much else, and this would not be a problem for me at all.

And once the thing that happens in this scene happens, if you pause for a moment to consider the logistics of it, it gets even more ridiculous.

But... first book. I'm cutting it some slack. The excerpt from the second book was enough of an improvement that I'll give it a shot. If I find it as serendipitously as I found the first one. I have a lot of other books waiting at home.

The first line in this one is "I was arrested in Eno's diner".