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The Visitor by Lee Child

by  Bunbry

Posted: Thursday, November 20, 2014
Word Count: 342
Summary: Number 4 in a series of about 17 novels that are huge best sellers. They are crime/ action books.




If you haven’t read Lee Child you should!  His books are like heroin for the eyes.  Everyone I know who reads his books loves them with a passion. 
His protagonist is Jack Reacher an ex-military cop who is of no fixed abode and pitches up in a new town at the start of every book and is swiftly engaged in some crime-solving, often in conjunction with local police who recognise his considerable talents.
He doesn’t play by any rules and is usually involved in lots of fights with the bad guys.  And Child tells a very compelling story with lots of hooks to draw you in.
In this one he is ‘blackmailed’ by the FBI into solving a series of murders of ex-army women found dead in a bath of green army paint.  There are no injuries and no sign of a struggle, so aside from catching the bad guy, we also have the mystery of how did they die?

This book is possibly his weakest in my opinion as, having read Agatha Christie’s “ABC Murders”, I recognised the plot and very quickly worked out who the killer was and what their motive was.  However I read to the end, just in case I was to be proved wrong, and to see what fiendishly clever murder method was employed to dispatch these very feisty women without a mark on their bodies.
What a let-down!  I won’t reveal the murder method, but in real life it would be impossible and I feel conned that such tat should be proposed as a murder method.  Also, the reason such an elaborate method was chosen (which would be hard to arrange as lots of paint needed to be stolen and transported around America) was feeble.  In the murderer's
shoes I would have used a simple method like a quick blow to the head and achieved similar results.
Please read Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books, I’m sure you’ll love them, and they can be read in any order, but this one is a big disappointment,  5/10