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Better Off Dead
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • THE BLOCKBUSTER JACK REACHER SERIES THAT INSPIRED TWO MAJOR MOTION PICTURES AND THE STREAMING SERIES REACHER
Digging graves had not been part of my plans when I woke up that morning.
Reacher goes where he wants, when he wants. That morning he was heading west, walking under the merciless desert sun—until he comes upon a curious scene. A Jeep has crashed into the only tree for miles around. A woman is slumped over the wheel.
Dead? No, nothing is what it seems.
The woman is Michaela Fenton, an army veteran turned FBI agent trying to find her twin brother, who might be mixed up with some dangerous people. Most of them would rather die than betray their terrifying leader, who has burrowed his influence deep into the nearby border town, a backwater that has seen better days. The mysterious Dendoncker rules from the shadows, out of sight and under the radar, keeping his dealings in the dark.
He would know the fate of Fenton’s brother.
Reacher is good at finding people who don’t want to be found, so he offers to help, despite feeling that Fenton is keeping secrets of her own. But a life hangs in the balance. Maybe more than one. But to bring Dendoncker down will be the riskiest job of Reacher's life. Failure is not an option, because in this kind of game, the loser is always better off dead.
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Reviews
These new books are almost unreadable. Sorry I preordered these.
By bookbum17
Poorly written. Boring plot. Unreadable.
By Trajann
Rambled
By Subscriberfor25years
I love all of the books by Lee and Andrew Child, they are simply the best. So thought out, meticulously detailed and suspense fully written. Keep it up boys!
By DWFREIDELL
...and I don’t say that lightly. I wanted to give the transition a chance. After all, I’d just started reading the series in late October 2023, and was looking forward to not running out of fun reading material for a while. But “The Sentinel” gave me pause, with its unimaginative plot. “Huh, ripped from the headline,” I’d thought. “Don’t think I ever saw that in a Reacher novel.” The style was gone too. Instead of the musical, whippy prose I’d grown to admire, “The Sentinel” adopted a more staccato yet droning quality. By that time, I’d read 24 Reacher novels and one short story collection in under 10 weeks, so I was in a good position to notice the change. Rebooted into the Mashable-grist plot and reimagined by a new clomping voice, Reacher has become...ordinary. I figured the first book was a gimme, and immediately plunged into “Better Off Dead.” It is, as stated, nearly unreadable. The pointless fragmentation of sentences is in full force. People. Do this. On Instagram. A lot. Too. And I have no idea what they think they’re achieving. Reacher has morphed into just a big dude moved by conventional loyalties and wisdom, and there’s a welter of unconvincing telling, not showing, of his smarts. Faint nods are given to Reacher character tics we’ve come to know, like his preoccupation with prime numbers—but so phoned in that you wonder if the new author just doesn’t get what that feels like, that pleasure Reacher takes in pattern recognition. I don’t know what happened. Conan Doyle could kill Holmes but bowed to public pressure and resuscitated him. Maybe today’s authors have publishing contracts that require a “use it or lose it” approach to valuable franchises. Whatever the case, I wish the Childs well. Thank you, L.C., for a wonderful 2 1/2 months.
By A. S. Kaku