Lee Child, Personal (New York: Delacorte Press, 2014). Hardcover / Kindle 

Lee Child has done it again. With Personal, he has written yet another Jack Reacher novel—the 19^th in the franchise!—that is unputdownable. From the first sentence to the last, Child grabs your attention and doesn’t let it go.

Reacher owes a guy a favor. The guy happens to be a one-star general and the protégé of a master spy. To repay the favor, Reacher needs to track down the military-trained sniper who took a .50-caliber shot at France’s president before he tries to assassinate other G8 leaders at an upcoming conference in London.

Here’s the thing, though. Reacher knows the sniper. He put him in prison 16 years ago, and now the sniper has a bullet with his name on it. Tracking him down takes Reacher to London and a game of cat-and-mouse with English and Serbian gangsters, including a psychopath ironically named Little Joey. As always, Reacher gets his man, but not before he discovers that truth is not what it seems and the baddest guys aren’t who he thought they were.

Reading a Lee Child novel is a guilty pleasure. What his books lack in philosophical depth, they more than make up for in tight prose, a whip-smart plot, plenty of action, and pacing that’ll make you want to lose sleep rather than close the book.

The only problem? You don’t know when Lee Child will publish his next book.

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