Fin­ished Bad Luck and Trou­ble by Lee Child. This is one of his books about ex-military police­man Jack Reacher.

In this one, Reacher is bum­ming around Ore­gon when he gets a mes­sage that one of his old Army bud­dies is in trou­ble. He goes to Los Ange­les, where he learns that some­one threw his buddy out of a heli­copter — and that sev­eral other mem­bers of his old Army unit are miss­ing. So Reacher teams up with Frances Nea­gley, another one of his for­mer offi­cers, and they start dig­ging into what hap­pened. Along the way, they join forces with two more mem­bers of their unit and uncover a con­spir­acy to sell weapons to the high­est bidder …

I really like the Reacher series — they’re just fun, action-packed reads. This one is no excep­tion. I loved the inter­ac­tion between Reacher and the mem­bers of his old unit in this one, as well as Reacher ques­tion­ing whether he’s really happy bum­ming around the coun­try with only his tooth­brush and his pass­port in his pocket. This is def­i­nitely one of the more real­is­tic, sym­pa­thetic por­tray­als of Reacher in the series.

In fact, I thought this was going to be one of the best books in the series — until I got to the end. Then, it all spun out of con­trol for me because Reacher does some­thing that just seemed com­pletely out of char­ac­ter for me — he waits to take out the bad guys and save his friends. I won’t spoil the end­ing here, except to say that I can see that Child was going for poetic jus­tice with it — it’s very eye-for-an-eye. But I just couldn’t help but think that some­one as smart as Reacher would take out his ene­mies as soon as pos­si­ble, rather than set them up in an elab­o­rate trap — and make his friends suf­fer while he car­ried out his plan.

But over­all, this is still an enter­tain­ing read. If you like thrillers, you have to check out this series. Thumbs up.

Up next: Some­thing About You by Julie James.

Books in my TBR pile: About 20.

What about you guys? Any­one plan­ning to read some­thing good this week­end? Share in the comments.