As heroes go, Jack Reacher travels light: The ex-Army cop carries just a toothbrush and none of the emotional baggage — alcoholism, divorce — that plague the protagonists of so many Scandinavian thrillers.
“We’ve always known him,” says Reacher’s creator, the British-born New Yorker Lee Child. “He’s the unattached loner, the mysterious stranger, the knight errant, who wanders around and tries to do good.” In fact, Reacher’s done great: Child’s latest book, “61 Hours,” is his 14th adventure. Isn’t he getting tired?
“Reacher isn’t limited to one city or one type of work,” Child tells The Post’s Barbara Hoffman. “He can be anywhere and do anything. I’ll keep writing him as long as people want to read about him.”
Here’s what’s in his library.
Stardust
by Joseph Kanon
Nobody captures the allure of the almost-forgotten past like Joe Kanon . . . this one wraps a murder mystery into the collision of WW II horrors and the insane glamour of 1945 Hollywood.
Absent Friends
by SJ Rozan
Typically, it took a crime-fiction master to best describe post-9/11 New York City. Rozan, a New Yorker, usually writes about the private detectives Lydia Chin and Bill Smith, from each one’s point of view. After 9/11, she wrote this heartfelt book. There’s exquisite precision in the storytelling, plus huge emotional force: like getting smashed in the face with a Swiss watch.
The Mapping of Love and Death
by Jacqueline Winspear
The latest (and maybe best) of the Maisie Dobbs series. Jacqueline Winspear is a British writer who moved to California. Maisie, her character, started out as a maid at an aristocratic home before going to WWI as a nurse. This latest book captures the pain of the maimed, post-WWI generation in Great Britain.
Invisible Boy
by Cornelia Read
A great New York story, based on real events, by one of our weirdest new talents. This time, Read’s heroine, Madeline Dare, goes to Queens and gets involved in a community project to clean up a graveyard. They find the body of a dead boy. What happened to him? It’s a great New York story . . . I think the best, most original books now are being written by women.
