I'm taking a break from work—and intruding on your day—to say a sincere thank-you, and to tell you about a few things. First, the thanks: You made THE AFFAIR my most successful book ever. You made it an all-format, all-category number-one best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously. (The last book to do that was a Harry Potter.) In other words, you made it the best-selling book in the English-speaking world during the week of its release. Thank you for that! I hope you enjoyed it. I've heard from plenty of people who did. Writing about Reacher's last case in uniform was a lot of fun. It comes out in paperback on March 27th, so if you missed it, you can catch up then. The work I'm taking a break from is finishing up this year's book, which is called A WANTED MAN. I'm not exactly sure what happens yet—as I said, I haven't quite finished it, and I never know the ending—but I can tell you it picks up right on the end of WORTH DYING FOR and continues Reacher's current-day story over the next few days. As always, the big guy is trying to stay out of trouble, but he hitches a ride in the wrong car...
Also, I want to mention that I'll be in Seattle on March 10th for a library benefit and in New York on March 13th for a masterclass at the Center for Fiction. Then I'll be in Lyons, France, for a convention at the end of the month, and in New York again on the 24th of April for the launch of VENGEANCE, the MWA anthology that I edited, and the next day I'll be in Boston for another library benefit (SaveTheLibraries.com) before heading out to Hilton Head for another library gig on May 1st. If you're near any of those events, I'd love to see you. The other big news is Diane Capri—a friend of mine—wrote a book revisiting the events of KILLING FLOOR in Margrave, Georgia. She imagines an FBI team tasked to trace Reacher's current-day whereabouts. They begin by interviewing people who knew him—starting out with Roscoe and Finlay. Check out this review from Amazon: "Oh heck yes! I am in love with this book. I'm a huge Jack Reacher fan. If you don't know Jack (pun intended!) then get thee to the bookstore/wherever you buy your fix and pick up one of the many Jack Reacher books by Lee Child. Heck, pick up all of them. In particular, read Killing Floor. Then come back and read Don't Know Jack. This story picks up the other from the point of view of Kim and Gaspar, FBI agents assigned to build a file on Jack Reacher. The problem is, as anyone who knows Reacher can attest, he lives completely off the grid. No cell phone, no house, no car...he's not tied down. A pretty daunting task, then, wouldn't you say? "First lines: "Just the facts. And not many of them, either. Jack Reacher's file was too stale and too thin to be credible. No human could be as invisible as Reacher appeared to be, whether he was currently above the ground or under it. Either the file had been sanitized, or Reacher was the most off-the-grid paranoid Kim Otto had ever heard of." Right away, I'm sensing who Kim Otto is and I'm delighted that I know something she doesn't. You see, I DO know Jack. And I know he's not paranoid. Not really. I know why he lives as he does, and I know what kind of man he is. I loved having that over Kim and Gaspar. If you haven't read any Reacher novels, then this will feel like a good, solid story in its own right. If you have...oh if you have, then you, too, will feel like you have a one-up on the FBI. It's a fun feeling! "Kim and Gaspar are sent to Margrave by a mysterious boss who reminds me of Charlie, in Charlie's Angels. You never see him...you hear him. He never gives them all the facts. So they are left with a big pile of nothing. They end up embroiled in a murder case that seems connected to Reacher somehow, but they can't see how. Suffice to say the efforts to find the murderer, and Reacher, and not lose their own heads in the process, makes for an entertaining read. "I love the way the author handled the entire story. The pacing is dead on (ok another pun intended), the story is full of twists and turns like a Reacher novel would be, but it's another viewpoint of a Reacher story. It's an outside-in approach to Reacher. "You might be asking, do they find him? Do they finally meet the infamous Jack Reacher? "Go...read...now...find out!" Sounds great, right? It's available as an e-book only, and you can get it HERE. Check it out, and let me know what you think. So that's it for now ... again, thanks for reading THE AFFAIR, and I hope you'll like A WANTED MAN just as much in September. Lee Child    |
