I had several books in my Christmas stocking this year and these were three of them.
I finished the Lee Child first of all and I have to say that I continue to enjoy his writing enormously - he delivers great pace and Jack Reacher is a strong and compelling character. It was just as I finished the book that I read in the news that Lee Child is now giving up writing and going to ask his brother to write for him instead. I have to say that I had mixed emotions about this, not because I have any knowledge about whether his brother will be any better than he is, but because I have to say that I found Blue Moon to be overly full of gratuitous killing and violence and I was actually quite pleased to get to the end. I like a good fight scene like the rest of us, but this book delivers killing after killing and and it felt all a bit over done and not that believable. Which was a shame, and left me thinking that perhaps Jack Reacher had run his course. Which was when I read that Lee Child was no longer going to write any more and I sort of wondered whether he, too, had reached the same conclusion. Too bad. Some parts were great, but overall I thought this was a 5.5 or 6 out of 10 only.
The John Le Carré however, was a very different story altogether, and I will post something about that book in a future post.