A Wanted Man by Lee Child

Equal parts Jack Kerouac, Hercule Poirot, and Chuck Norris, retired military police officer Jack Reacher travels across the U.S. and fortunately (for us readers) finds himself in the midst of intrigue on a regular basis.

And by "in the middle" I mean that literally. In Lee Child's A Wanted Man, Reacher is hitchhiking through Nebraska and gets a ride from from three corporate types driving home from a team building exercise. Or so they say. For what seems like the first third of the novel, Reacher is inside this car while back in Nebraska the FBI is investigating a brutal knife murder committed by two men who have since vanished.

How Reacher gets out of that car, why the State Dept. and CIA start sniffing around, and how Reacher catches back up to the car's occupants make up the rest of the story. In the end Reacher does one of the things he does best - he takes up arms and becomes a one man wrecking crew.

Lee Child has achieved what a good author strives for. He created a character in Jack Reacher who's believable (despite being fictional), likable (despite being mysterious), and flawed (despite being unstoppable). And Dick Hill's voice acting, as it has been on every Jack Reacher audiobook I've heard, is absolutely fantastic. In this case doubly so because Reacher's broken nose required Hill to read all of  Reacher's lines - for the entire novel - in a nasal voice.

And if for no other reason, you should read A Wanted Man to find out how to speak for one minute without using the letter A.

For more information see Lee Child's website at http://www.leechild.com/ and Dick Hill's website at http://www.dickhill.com/.

I received no compensation of any kind for this review.