#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • INCLUDES BONUS MATERIAL • “Reacher gets better and better. . . . [This is the] craftiest and most highly evolved of Lee Child’s electrifying Reacher books.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Child is a superb craftsman of suspense, juggling several plots and keeping his herrings well-rouged. . . . Chances are you’ll want to seek out other Reacher adventures the … to seek out other Reacher adventures the moment you finish.”—Entertainment Weekly
A bus crashes in a savage snowstorm and lands Jack Reacher in the middle of a deadly confrontation. In nearby Bolton, South Dakota, one brave woman is standing up for justice in a small town threatened by sinister forces. If she’s going to live long enough to testify, she’ll need help. Because a killer is coming to Bolton, a coldly proficient assassin who never misses.
Reacher’s original plan was to keep on moving. But the next 61 hours will change everything. The secrets are deadlier and his enemies are stronger than he could have guessed—but so is the woman he’ll risk his life to save.
“Masterful . . . a tour-de-force of both structure and suspense.”—The Providence Journal
“Child keeps his foot hard on the throttle. . . . This is Child in top form, but isn’t he always?”—Booklist (starred review)
“Compulsively addictive [with] an explosive climax that will have you tearing out your hair until Reacher’s next appearance.”—The Miami Herald
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Great reading
This book just didn’t stop. Kept me on the edge of my seat to the end. Probably the best Jack Reacher book in the series. (Also, one of the best audiobooks)
It’s Reacher, enough said
Like all Reacher novels, a fast read with plenty of action and witty dialogue.
Winter in South Dakota. A bus load of old folks on a touring holiday. And one hitchhiker – Jack Reacher. When the bus skids off the road and crashes, Reacher helps out and soon finds himself awaiting temporary lodgings in a small-town police station. But something’s wrong in this town – with a biker gang holed up a few miles down the road, a vulnerable witness needing police protection and a potential killer on the way, Reacher must stand up and do what’s right. Unless the bad guys get there first.
This book is number 14 in Lee Child’s ‘Jack Reacher’ series and like the previous one (Gone Tomorrow) there’s not as much ass-kicking as we’ve come to expect from the ex-army wanderer. Nevertheless, the detail in this book is almost as mesmerising as Reacher’s stock-in-trade hard-man exploits. The situation he finds himself in doesn’t demand constant hand-to-hand combat, but it does boast a cast of fascinating characters, precise and perceptive detail and a tension that simmers throughout the book like a time-bomb. And indeed, as the title suggests, there’s only so many hours available before the crap hits the proverbial.
Despite the lack of action, this is an engrossing and completely thrilling book that kept me turning the pages in anticipation.
I rarely reread books. I’ve reread all the Reacher books twice. And plan do so again soon. Reacher’s world is the way we wish things happened; that when bad people doing bad things go unpunished someone steps in to make it right. That someone… is Jack Reacher.
Love all Jack Reacher books!!
A bus accident during a brutal snow storm strands Jack Reacher in Bolton, SD. There, he gets wrapped up in a murder for hire, a meth/crime ring, a dirty cop, an important witness and an abandoned Air Force facility. It’s Jack Reacher. Need I say more?
another great Jack Reacher story
GOOD BOOK
Lee Child’s books? Show me Jack Reacher’s name and I know it’s going to be great fun.
Typical Jack Reacher – smart, and there to save the day. His bus is wrecked and Jack arrives in a small snowbound town to find trouble left over from World War Two.
I’ve enjoyed every Jack Reacher novel I’ve read and expect to enjoy every one I still have to read!
Reacher is one of the best characters in fiction and Child is a great writer.
One of my favorite Reacher books! I feel that Lee Child is one of the best authors that I have ever read!
Ex-military man–specifically, military policeman–Jack Reacher is adrift in America with, quite literally, only the clothes on his back. To say the man travels light is one of the world’s great understatements. 61 HOURS is the fourteenth book in the Reacher series. As it opens, he’s on a tour bus in South Dakota, having paid the driver to let him join the elderly passengers who are en route to Mount Rushmore in the dead of winter. It is snowing, with a bigger storm that’s coming from Wyoming expected to hit, and the temperatures are bitter. An oncoming car goes into a skid and the bus driver, tired after a long day of concentrating because of the weather conditions, tries to avoid it. The bus slides on the glazed road surface and winds up in a ditch.
The nearest town is a small one named Bolton. Because of problems within the town, help is delayed in getting to the bus. But eventually it arrives, and the freezing passengers are taken to town–some to hospitals. The townspeople are kind enough to let the uninjured stay in their homes until new transportation arrives for them. The one who takes in Reacher is the deputy police chief.
As events unfold, Reacher learns that outside town there’s an old military installation, long unused, that’s currently occupied by an outlaw biker gang. The local authorities are sure the bikers are manufacturing and selling methamphetamines, but they haven’t got sufficient cause to search the installation. However, one of the bikers has been jailed and is awaiting trial because a local woman, elderly librarian Janet Salter, saw him engaged in a transaction. The bikers are working for the ruthless and deadly head of a Mexican drug cartel, a man who goes by the name Plato. Janet Salter is willing to testify at the biker’s trial and is consequently under twenty-four-hour protection.
The Bolton chief of police and his deputy chief realize that Reacher, with his experience and apparent willingness to help, is an asset they can’t afford to ignore. And since neither he nor any of the other bus passengers can go anywhere until the storm lessens sufficiently for another bus to get there, they allow him to involve himself in their problems.
As matters progress, several mysteries develop, one of which is the identity of the hit man Reacher and the police know has been dispatched to kill Janet Salter, another the reason the military installation was built fifty years earlier and what might be there still.
The story moves along at a terrific pace–even during some chapters when all anyone can do is wait to see what will or won’t happen–helped in no small measure by Lee Child’s staccato prose style, one made up principally of short declarative sentences and sentence fragments. What seems at first to be a straight thriller proves to also be a detective story, with Reacher deducing from events the reader is privy to who the hit man is.
61 HOURS is a thriller and a chiller, the frigid-beyond-imagining South Dakota winter playing a major role in the story. Child describes it vividly throughout the novel, and many a reader will shiver through these passages–especially if it’s cold where he is while reading it.
The climax is tense and wild, as Reacher comes face to face with the nefarious Plato, and ends with a cliffhanger that’s presumably resolved in the next book in the series.
This is the first of the Reacher novels I’ve read. I’ve heard and read good things about them from other reviewers. I don’t know if they’re best read in order, but after reading 61 HOURS, I’m sure I’ll be reading some of the others.
(c) 2011 Barry Ergang
Another Lee Child, Jack Reacher thriller. No one does it better.
This was my first Teacher book. I think I’ve read them all now and seen the movies too. Tom Cruse needs to gain weight and height but his attitude is about right.
Loved it…unique concept
Having been an MP E7 for 14 years, this book easy reading and one I didn’t want to put it down to get a shower. Jack Reacher is like Jack Ryan of “HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER”. 61 HOURS was my first Lee Child book, but it certainly NOT my. Last. My back specialist suggested/recommended him.