I first discovered Lee Child sometime around 2010. At the time I was still working in Northern Virginia and living way out in northern central Virginia. My commute was around 100 miles round trip and, for those of you who have experienced that area's traffic, you know that means I had a loooooong commute. Like close to 4 hours a day in the car, 5 days a week. To keep from going insane, I listened to a LOT of audiobooks.
My local library had tons of books on CD and I went through them at a rate of 2-3 per week. I quickly went through their collection of authors I was already a fan of and books I had on my to-read list. I noticed The Killing Floor was a recommended listen one week when I was in picking up my latest stack and decided to give it a try. I loved it. I was totally sucked in to the world of Jack none Reacher. The books in the series quickly became favorites to listen to on my commute.
My life has changed a lot since those days. I moved to Oklahoma and stopped commuting so far - these days I'm a stay-at-home mom and Etsy-shopkeep and it takes me about a year to put the same number of miles on my car now that I used to accumulate in under a month and I rarely listen to audiobooks anymore. I still love Jack Reacher though and I still eagerly anticipate each year's newest installment in his world courtesy of Lee Child.
No Middle Name: The Complete Collected Jack Reacher Short Stories is a short story collection you can read at any point in the series - none of the stories are reliant on any of the books. I've read other short story collections tied in to book series before and I have to say, this one is, by far, the best I've read. Other authors have made the mistake of putting vital information into the stories that make subsequent novels difficult to follow or create collections that must be read in a specific order and in between specific books to be fully comprehensible. Not so with No Middle Name. Each story stands alone as either a mini Reacher adventure (Second Son, Too Much Time) or simply as character background filler (No Room at the Motel, Everyone Talks). Even the stories that are barely about Reacher (James Penney's New Identity) serve a purpose. I might even recommend this collection to anyone who hasn't yet picked up a Reacher novel as a quick intro to the character and to Child's writing style.
I really loved this collection. It almost makes the wait to the newest Reacher novel bearable. Almost.
