Jack Reacher jumps off a bus and walks fourteen miles down a country road into Margrave, Georgia. An arbitrary decision he’s about to regret.

Reacher is the only stranger in town on the day they have had their first homicide in thirty years.The cops arrest Reacher and the police chief turns eyewitness to place him at the scene. As nasty secrets leak out, and the body count mounts, one thing is for sure.

They picked the wrong guy to take the fall.

34 Chp | 16hr 21mins | 4/5 | Narrated by Jeff Harding | 🌟🌟🌟🌟

I have had the book Killing Floor on my tbr shelf for about 5 years now and I have NEVER got around to reading it. Seeing it there always irritated me because I fully wanted to read it but life, as usual, is unpredictable. Anyway, my sister has become obsessed with listing to the audiobooks of Jack Reacher. She said that they are the right level to listen to but not need too much focus when she is doing her felting craft.

As I tend to listen to audiobooks when I’m driving or involved in mind-numbing spreadsheet work, I was interested as to whether listening to the book would work for me.

This became a steady listen for me. I do a lot of boring but essential work on a Thursday and Friday afternoon, and I need something that keeps me engaged while still allowing me to do my job and this became something I looked forward to listening to.

Jeff Harding is a fantastic narrator. He has a way of making the characters come alive and I enjoyed that each character had their own individual voice and accent. It’s hard to get the mood of a book right when narrating it and I think Harding did a stellar job here.

My sister would call this book a crime thriller, but I would put it more in a crime-action sub-genre. It wasn’t exactly heart palpitating or full of unexpected twists and turns like a thriller would be but it hard enough core elements to leave it in the crime genre. It was more action though, I’ve not watched the television version of it, though my family do rave about it, but I did get a lot of spy/army vibes while listening to this book.

As such a well-known series, I did approach this with little to no expectations and I think not knowing anything substantial about the series going in, gave me an advantage while listening. I got to experience the book in my own headspace and form my own opinions.

There were elements of this book that were very easy for me to guess and solve. It wasn’t a particularly hard case to crack. However, I was more invested in the characters themselves and how they evolved through the story. I am told that Killing Floor is the only book in the series that is written in first person, so it was interesting to have that knowledge in mind as I listened. I think having the first book in first person opened a deeper exploration into Jack Reacher’s character that I wouldn’t have necessarily got in third person.

I suppose I became rather enthralled by the characters actions, thoughts, and process as the read continued. There is an art to being able to bring a character to life through spoken word and I felt that I got a good sense of what their potential next moves would be in the characterisation that Jeff Harding gave them. I could clearly picture each character in my head and create a detailed picture of the story as it unfolded. I can sometimes zone out while I’m listening to an audiobook, so I remarked several times to myself, the ability to stay focused on this listen, and much of that was down to Harding’s storytelling.

I am someone who craves long book series, and the Jack Reacher series is LONG! I am looking forward to learning more about Reacher and how his character changes and evolves through the series. I feel pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this listen and how content I felt at the ending. I do have the second book ready to listen to in audible, but I might try and read an actual book or two before I dive back into the world of Jack Reacher.