Nothing to loose

Authors: Lee Child
Narrator: Dick Hill
Duration: 14H 25m
My Rating: ⭐⭐🌑🌑🌑
Tags: action - detective

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As story about cities called “Hope” and “Despair”. I would not say that I enjoyed this book much - I did not want to come back to it and was listening to others - there was no twisted plots or anything interesting going on.

Quotes:

And Reacher was no kind of a gourmet. He rated food quality as either adequate or not adequate, and the adequate category was always by far the larger of the two. So he ate and drank and enjoyed it all well enough.

And in his earnest childhood manner Reacher had pondered the experience and felt he had learned a valuable lesson. Years later during advanced army training that lesson had been reinforced. At the grand strategic level it even had a title:Overwhelming Force. At the individual level in sweaty gyms the thugs doing the training had pointed out that gentlemen who behaved decently weren’t around to train anyone. They were already dead. Therefore:Hit early, hit hard. Overwhelming force. Hit early, hit hard. Reacher called it:Get your retaliation in first.

Back when it had mattered for forensic purposes he had gotten pretty good at recognizing film stock by its color biases. This print had strong greens, which was a Fuji characteristic. Kodak products favored the reds and the warmer tones.

Other than that it looked a lot like the ready room he had seen at the Halfway county morgue. Desk, paper, bulletin boards, armchairs, all of it showing the signs of casual abuse a place gets when its users are not its owners.

Reacher didn’t like crowds. He enjoyed solitude and was a mild agoraphobic, which didn’t mean he was afraid of wide-open spaces. That was a common misconception. He liked wide-open spaces. Instead he was mildly unsettled by theagora, which was an ancient Greek word for a crowded public marketplace. Random crowds were bad enough. He had seen footage of stampedes and stadium disasters. Organized crowds were worse. He had seen footage of riots and revolutions. A crowd two hundred strong was the largest animal on the face of the earth. The heaviest, the hardest to control, the hardest to stop. The hardest to kill. Big targets, but after-action reports always showed that crowds took much less than one casualty per round fired. Crowds had nine lives.

The army record for a fifty-yard low crawl was about twenty seconds. At the other extreme, snipers could spend all day crawling fifty yards into position. On this occasion Reacher budgeted five minutes. Fast enough to get the job done, slow enough to get it done safely. Generally the human brain noticed speed and discontinuity. A tortoise heading inward worried nobody. A cheetah bounding in got everyone’s attention.

If a stair squeaked, ninety-nine times in a hundred it squeaked in the center, where it was weakest. He put his hand on the door handle and lifted. If a door squeaked, ninety-nine times in a hundred it was because it had dropped on its hinges. Upward pressure helped.

Xeric plants, or xerophilous, drought tolerant, from the Greek prefixxero, meaning dry. Hence Xerox, for copying without wet chemicals.

He had spent time in small planes, when the army had wanted him to get somewhere faster than a jeep or a train could have gotten him. He had found them small and trivial and somehow unserious. They were like flying cars. He had told himself they were better built than cars, but he hadn’t found much concrete evidence to convince himself with. Thin metal, bent and folded and riveted, flimsy clips and wires, coughing engines.

He had never blundered into trouble through impatience, and he never planned to.

Theoretically the box might be booby-trapped, or he might get hit on the head while he crouched down next to it. But he felt either thing was unlikely. The instructors at Rucker had said:be skeptical, but not too skeptical. Too much skepticism led to paranoia and paralysis.

Steel is a wonderful thing, Mr. Reacher. It goes around and around. Peugeots and Toyotas from the Gulf might once have been Fords and Chevrolets from Detroit, and they in turn might once have been Rolls-Royces from England or Holdens from Australia. Or bicycles or refrigerators. Some steel is new, of course, but surprisingly little of it. Recycling is where the action is.

In general Reacher didn’t care for the corruption of written language. U for you, EZ foreasy, hi for high, lo for low . He had spent many years in school learning to read and spell and he wanted to feel that there had been some point to it. But he couldn’t get too worked up about U-Haul. What was the alternative? Self-Drive Trucks? Too clunky. Too generic. No kind of a catchy business name. He followed thirty feet behind the bright rolling billboard and the triple U-Haul logos blurred together and filled his field of view

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Thurman should know that quotation better than anyone. It’s from the Bible. Matthew, chapter twenty-six, verse fifty-two. Slightly paraphrased. Also, they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. Hosea, chapter eight, verse seven. I’m sick of people who claim to live by the scriptures cherry-picking the parts they find convenient, and ignoring all the rest.