Hard as nails

The SAS is to Chris Ryan what horse racing is to Dick Francis'

For most fans of Lee Child the greatest draw is his military police tough guy Jack Reacher...To be fair, Reacher is more of a thinking girl's beefcake - I can see Russell Crowe already angling for the movie part

Jack Reacher is a most magnetic creation, tough, cool and ultimately moral

Lee Child's protagonist, Jack Reacher, is a hero in the Dirty Harry style, a man who lives by his own principles...Produces a surprising twist when it's least expected

A good, edge-of-the-seat thriller

Child has perfected Reacher's controlled, spare tone...as always, there's lots of bonecrunching and nose-smashing, yet the violence never feels gratuitous.

An unusually political novel, this is as gripping and readable as any in the Reacher series.

It's a testament to Lee Child's superb story-telling skills that...the interest doesn't flag for an instant...Like Reacher, Child doesn't do things by halves.

Gripping and addictive...Reacher's stripped-down life is echoed by Lee Child's lean and spare prose.

One of the genre's most enduring heroes. Tough, solitary, righteous and incorruptible, [Reacher] harks back to another great fictional detective, Philip Marlowe.

A new Jack Reacher novel arrives as the year's first red-hot beach book...the success of these books rests partly on the big, hulking shoulders of their charismatic hero...one of the most enduring action heroes on the American landscape.

This haunting, stand-alone novel is a subtler work than Child's previous output and offers a sensitively handled romantic sub-plot to boot.