Saturday 16 March 2013

Two Shot

After watching the movie, I decided to work through the books (the audio books are around 13 hours each). I'm up to One Shot, on which the movie was based.

In general... they are not the best written books either. Two cliches you'll need to write like Lee Child:

  • [Person] said nothing.
  • "That's for damn sure."
Repeated time and again...

Worse written book so far is Tripwire. Terrible plot points, irritating characters, and a perfect example of the bad guy being too good before suddenly being cut down in improbability. Without Fail probably gets the best written so far. Interesting story, developed well.

Compared with the movie, One Shot is amazingly over padded. I like what Christopher McQuarrie did for the movie. Characters were dropped. Half the book was thrown out. There was more focus on the victims to actually make them more than excessively minor plot points. He also added in more action scenes (very few in Reacher novels), and what exactly happened confused me, so the book was better for that. Overall, casting aside, I'm going with the movie as the better version.

Still ten more books to go. Onwards!

[END]

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