One Shot, Lee Child Reading Response

I finished reading the book One Shot by Lee Child.  The book is about Jack Reacher, a military police detective who gets called in to assist in the defense of James Barr, a presumed murderer who the police think shot and killed 5 innocent civilians.  Lee Child uses many interesting writing techniques that added suspense and tension to the story.  He has minor descriptions with so much detail that they read like an action scene.  He also has lots of quick sentence changes that keep the reader attentive and also surprises them, As well as interesting and new ways of writing dialogue. 

           

            On page 8 of the book, the shooter is describing the people walking in front of a big building across the street from him, some of whom would become his victims. 

“The stream of people thickened up.  Now there were so many of them coming out all at once that they had to pause and group and shuffle and wait to get into single file too pass between two low walls.  Just like the traffic had snarled at the bottom of First Street. A bottleneck.  After you.  No, after you.  It made the people slow.  Now they were slow ducks in a shooting gallery.”  This paragraph had me at the edge of my seat when reading it.  Besides it being a very tense situation, since the shooter was about to eliminate 5 of those people, the writing added to the tension.  The use of the word “and” in that paragraph (had to pause and group and shuffle and wait)

gave the paragraph a jumpy and strained rhythm, adding to the sinister feeling.  Finally the shooter comparing the people to inanimate objects two times added to the dark feeling of the situation.

            Another technique the author used was in the dialogue; he didn’t have a lot of words after each line.  Like “he said.”  This increases the speed of the book and read like watching a movie, where character’s interactions with dialogue are quick.  This kept me interested in what the characters had to say.

            Finally, at the climax of the book, where Reacher is infiltrating a house filled with enemies, he finds two of them, both monitoring screens with a live feed of thermal cameras placed around the house.  He has to take them out, silently.  “Reacher took a long silent step into the room.  Paused.  Held his breath.  Reversed the knife in his hand.  Held the blade an inch from its end between the ball of his thumb and the knuckle of his first finger.  Raised his arm.  Cocked it behind his head.  Snapped it forward. ¶ Threw the knife. ¶  It buried itself two inches deep in the back of Solokov’s neck.”    Lee Child used short, abrupt sentences to add to the suspense of the scene.  The detail of how Reacher held the knife added details that helped build up to the climax of the scene.  And the quick transition from description to action added a unique surprise to the scene that you coudnt have gotten in a film.

            One Shot by Lee Child was a great book that had a lot of great scenes with suspense and action and kept me interested throughout the whole book.  I learned a few interesting techniques for my own writing of fiction.  Short sentences, repeated words or phrases  and using metaphors in describing something to get into the characters head.  I really enjoyed this book and I am going to read more books in this series.