Killing Floor

To see what all the Jack Reacher fuss was about, I picked up Killing Floor, the first installment in the series. The text, 407 pages in paperback, contains probably 300 pages of what I would call sawdust: Reacher eating eggs, Reacher buying supplies, Reacher driving somewhere, Reacher eating more eggs. When you actually get to an action scene, it is more likely than not a disappointment, carried off in a deadpan manner. The clipped non-sentences take some getting used to; but after about 100 pages the reader has stopped trying to find merit in the prose and is simply flipping through to get to the next action sequence. There is some suspense here, but there's too much other stuff or, more accurately, stuffing.