Worth Dying For

Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2010: You'd think that after 14 novels featuring hardscrabble hero, Jack Reacher, Lee Child's pulse-pounding series would start showing signs of wear. It is nothing short of remarkable that Child is not only able to continually reinvent his ex-military cop, but that each installment is better than the last. Worth Dying For finds our battered hero hiding in plain sight in a tiny Nebraska town, trying to recover from the catastrophe he left behind in South Dakota (no spoilers here, but readers are still arguing over 61 Hours’s cliffhanger ending). Fans rarely see such a physically vulnerable Reacher (in the first part of the book he is barely able to lift his arms) but it just adds to the fist-pumping satisfaction of seeing our weary good guy take on the small-town baddies. --Daphne Durham