Reacher: The Stories Behind the Stories

In this occasionally insightful curio, Child (In Too Deep) shares the inspirations for 24 of his Jack Reacher novels, mostly pulling from introductions he wrote for each book’s special edition. He tackles the novels in series order, giving the book a loose narrative arc beginning in the 1990s, when he started writing Killing Floor after being laid off from a TV directing job. After that book’s success, the series’ popularity gradually gathered steam in the 2000s, and Child writes of his resulting experiments with story structure, shifting from “one-track first-person narrative[s] set in a small no-account rural town” to “a third-person multiple-POV story involving glossy elements like the White House and the Hoover Building.” The terse prose and short chapters lend the collection a somewhat phoned-in quality, but personal revelations are scattered among the shop talk. Most memorably, Child writes of responding “OK” to news of his father’s death (“This was a typical conversation with most of my family. Short, sharp, to the point, nothing wasted”). Though lacking in broad appeal, this offers a handful of worthwhile tidbits for die-hard Jack Reacher fans. Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Agency. (Sept.)