Summary and Reviews of Echo Burning by Lee Child

Echo Burning by Lee Child

Echo Burning

A Jack Reacher Thriller

by Lee Child
  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • First Published:
  • Jun 1, 2001, 368 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Apr 2002, 432 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

Brilliantly plotted. ..For anyone who thinks the hard-boiled genre is growing soft around the edges.

Ex-military cop Jack Reacher returns in this latest in the award-winning series critics call "spectacular" (The Seattle Times), "relentless" (Denver Post), and "perfect" (The New York Times Book Review).

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

Boston Globe
Echo Burning is the best mystery I have read this year; best written, best plotted, best in just about every way.

Booklist
This fifth Reacher novel is brilliantly plotted. ..For anyone who thinks the hard-boiled genre is growing soft around the edges.

Library Journal
Child's Jack Reacher series just keeps on getting better.

Publishers Weekly
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.

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Read-Alikes

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