Reacher is hitching through the heat of West Texas and getting desperate for a ride. The last thing he's worried about is exactly who picks him up. She's called Carmen. She's a good-looking young woman, she has a beautiful little girl . . .and she has married into the wrong family. They're called the Greers. They're a bitter and miserly clan, and they've made her life a living hell. Worse, her monster of a husband is soon due out of prison. So she needs protection, and she needs it now. Lawyers can't help. Cops can't be trusted. So Reacher goes home with her to the lonely ranch where nothing is as it seems, and where evil swirls around them like dust in a storm. Within days, Carmen's husband is dead - and simmering secrets send Echo, Texas, up in flames.
Echo Burning (Jack Reacher, No. 5)
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Jack Reacher is Spenser before Robert Parker domesticated his Boston PI--in fact, Reacher's even tougher than Hawk. He can inhale and exhale a few times and pump up his muscles so they make a bad character think twice about tangling with him. And he's spent enough time on the right side of the law to know how to operate in the gray zone if that's what it takes to save the fair maiden, punish the bad guys, and right any other wrongs he happens to encounter in the course of his wanderings. Echo Burning is vintage Lee Child, a smartly paced, intricately plotted, and masterfully characterized thriller starring Reacher, the ex-military cop who's so concerned about commitment to anything--a woman, possessions, a permanent address--that he only owns the clothes on his back. But he's the kind of justice-seeking guy you'd want on your side, especially if you were an abused wife trapped in a marriage you can't get out of until, and unless, somebody bumps off your old man.
Reacher's sympathetic, but he's not crazy. Nonetheless, he allows himself to be drawn into beautiful Carmen Greer's orbit, which ought to teach a guy not to hitchhike. Agreeing to protect her from the husband who's about to be released from jail and, according to Carmen, who's about to pay her back for tipping off the authorities to the tax fraud that landed him in prison, Reacher moves into the bunkhouse of the Echo, Texas, ranch that's owned by the bigoted, bitter, but powerful Greer family, which despises Carmen because she's Mexican and tolerates her only because she's Sloop Greer's wife and the mother of his child. The expected bloodshed ensues, but it's Sloop, not Carmen, who ends up with a bullet in his head. Reacher's convinced that Carmen acted in self-defense, even after other evidence comes to light that suggests there's more--and less--to her unhappy tale than even her own lawyer believes. This is the best Jack Reacher yet, smart, stylish, and convincing. If it's your first encounter with Child's work, be sure to check out his backlist--Running Blind, Tripwire, etc. --Jane Adams --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Jack Reacher, the vagabond freelance lawman who never hesitates to stick his nose into private business, takes his lively act to Texas, embroiling himself in what starts as a messy domestic dispute before turning far more ominous. The rugged former army cop comes to the aid of Carmen Greer, who picks him up on the side of the road one morning outside Lubbock, then asks him to kill her abusive husband. Sloop Greer is getting out of prison in a few days, and Carmen fears he will start beating her again. Reacher declines, but agrees to protect Carmen, hiring on as a cowhand at the couple's remote ranch in Echo County, Tex., far outside Pecos. Within hours of Sloop's return from prison, where he was serving time for tax evasion, violence strikes. But the victim isn't Carmen; it's Sloop. He's found shot dead, and Carmen is arrested. End of story? Hardly. Most wandering heroes would move on at this point, but not Reacher. He begins taking a hard look at both Carmen and Sloop's past, as well as local history. What he finds ugly secrets, human suffering, political evil is repulsive to a man who's been around as many blocks as Reacher. Child (Running Blind; Tripwire) has developed a fine franchise with Reacher, who comes from the Robin Hood mold, but has enough personal quirks and moments of unusual insight to separate him from the pack. Set in a literally and figuratively smoldering landscape, this is a clean, infectious story that taps deeply into two troubling human emotions the psychology of abuse and the desire for retribution. Author tour. (July)Forecast: Reacher's fifth adventure a BOMC, Literary Guild, Mystery Guild and Doubleday Book Club selection is among his strongest, and should hook even those who haven't read the other novels in the series.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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More About the Author
Lee Child is the #1 internationally bestselling author of thirteen Reacher thrillers, including the New York Times bestsellers The Enemy, One Shot, The Hard Way, and the #1 bestselling Bad Luck and Trouble and Nothing to Lose. His debut, Killing Floor, won both the Anthony and the Barry awards for Best First Mystery, and The Enemy won both the Barry and the Nero awards for Best Novel. Foreign rights in the Reacher series have sold in forty territories, and all titles have been optioned for major motion pictures. Child, a native of England and a former television director, lives in New York City, where he is at work on his fourteenth Reacher thriller, 61 Hours.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
42 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great read by the master,
By
This review is from: Echo Burning (Jack Reacher) (Paperback)
Its hard to beat Jack Reacher books when they are on form.Each generation, I suppose, has its favorite fictional Tough Guys. For my parents, it may have been Bogart and The Duke. For me, they've been Clint, Bruce, and Mel on the Big Screen, and the literary British spy Quiller. However, in the past couple of years, Jack Reacher has arrived on the killing fields. And he's perhaps tougher, certainly smarter, than any who've gone before.
A former Army major assigned to the Military Police, Jack has been aimlessly roaming the United States through several novels, and attracting big trouble in each one. In ECHO BURNING, he's hitchhiked into sunburnt West Texas where he's given a ride by Carmen Greer, who's cruising the highways on the lookout for a Tough Guy. Carmen lives with her young daughter, Ellie, on an arid ranch with her hateful brother-in-law and mother-in-law while her husband, Sloop, serves time in a federal pen for tax evasion. According to the story Carmen spins, her spouse had been viciously beating her for years. Since Sloop is due to be released in forty-eight hours, Carmen expects the beatings to begin anew, especially since she was the one that ratted on Sloop to the IRS. Will Reacher kill him for her? No? Well, will he at least teach her how to shoot the dainty pistol she's purchased? (In the meantime, what's with that team of three professional assassins circling the ranch unbeknownst to all? Jack may discover his hands full.) All those other Tough Guys I mentioned are smart, but not so much that they don't sporadically get beaten up and kicked silly by the Bad Guys. But not Reacher - nobody gets the drop on him. When the reader sees a violent confrontation looming, he almost feels sorry for the villains for the World of Hurt in which they'll soon find themselves. By his own admission, Jack's a hard man who likes cockroaches better than the men (and women) he's sometimes forced to exterminate. Reacher is endlessly fascinating. Having gone from one Army post to another, first as an Army brat and then on his own as an MP officer, he's never known a permanent home. So, now he chooses to live as a near-vagrant, shunning commitment to material things and the occasional interesting woman. He travels only with testosterone and a toothbrush, buying cheap clothes to wear and discard as he goes. He's educated, intelligent and gentlemanly, but excruciatingly asocial (as opposed to antisocial, which he's not) and heroically ignorant about how a "normal" life - wife, house, mortgage, kids, dog, 9 to 5, and Lexus - is lived. This is a man whom all you single ladies out there would love the chance to improve. (Don't cave, Jack! Be a role model for the rest of us New Age men pining to be free!) Hey, all you other Tough Guys of lore and legend, move aside and make room for a Real Man. This is a classic Reacher novel, fun and well written. I read it on holiday and thoroughly enjoyed it. I also read two of the Soft Target novels by Conrad Jones, great stories and shocking thrillers, a must for Reacher fans I couldnt put them. Try both they are great reading.
44 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
This is my least favorite,
By
This review is from: Echo Burning (Jack Reacher, No. 5) (Mass Market Paperback)
book so far in Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" series. Jack's a loner, and it is fitting that he's back on the road again after trying unsuccessfully to settle down. He's in hot, dry, west Texas (and Child really makes you feel as though you are there - you're thirsty throughout the story!) where he's enlisted himself to help an abused (?) wife, Carmen Greer, and her daughter, Ellie. Greer's tale is fraught with lies, and, if I were Jack, I would have given up on her. She's not able to escape her husband, Sloop, and his secretive pack of friends that The pace bogs down from time to time, and it is difficult to root for Carmen. The ending is a lot more transparent than anything Child has given us previously. Worst of all, Child gets bogged down in his own descriptiveness, a problem encountered in his earlier works, where it was more forgiveable and did less to hurt his characterization and his pace. Not giving up on Jack, because he is the most refreshing hero of the past few years, but one more average work by Lee Child will send me scurrying for some new authors!
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Echo Burning, Time Wasting,
This review is from: Echo Burning (Jack Reacher, No. 5) (Mass Market Paperback)
Lee Child may be one of the most inconsistent writers in popular fiction. Some of his books are very good, some are readable but not outstanding, and some, like Echo Burning, are just plain awful.
The book starts out with one of the most tired, worn-out cliches in the mystery genre; a lovely wife in distress asks hero Jack Reacher to help her out by killing her abusive husband. Savvy readers are then thinking, "Aha! There must be more to the story than this! Some unusual twist or surprise sub-plot." The answer? Nope. There's not. The book takes place in the Texas desert and if you chopped out every sentence describing how hot it is, the book would be about 20 pages long. Those remaining 20 pages would be descriptions of how long it takes to drive from one place to another out there in all that emptiness, which is what Reacher spends most of his time doing since the places he needs to go are so far apart. This book took me forever to finish because I couldn't get through more than 5 pages in one sitting without falling asleep. Lee Child may have written some exciting, fast-paced books in his career, but this is definitely not one of them.
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