APPENDICES BIOGRAPHY OF LEE CHILD

  APPENDICES BIOGRAPHY OF LEE CHILD Jim Grant (born 29 October 1954), better known by hisee Child, is a British

  ho wanders the United States.

  Jim Grant was born inis also a thriller novelist. Grant's parents moved him and his three brothers tin Birmingham when he was four years old, so that the boys could get a better education. Grant attended Cherry Orchard Primary School in Handsworth Wood until the age of 11. He attende

  In 1974, at age 20, Grant studiehough he had no intention of entering the legal profession and, during his student days, worked backstage in a theatre. After graduating, he worked i

  Grant joineNetwork, in as a presentation director.There he was involved with shows including

   Grant

  was involved in the transmission of more than 40,000 hours of programming for Granada, writing thousands of commercials and news stories.He worked at Granada from 1977–1995 and ended his career there with two years as a trade uni

  After being made redundant from his job due to corporate restructuring, Grant decided to start writing novels, stating they are "the purest form of entertainment." In 1997, his first novelwas published, and he moved to the United States in the summer of 1998.

  His pen name "Lee" comes from a family joke about mispronunciation of the name of Renault'with "Child" indicating where Grant would place his work on bookstore shelves betw

  Grant has said that he chose the name Reacher for the central character in his novels because he himself is tall and, in a supermarketin Kendal, Cumbria, when he was living ihis wife Jane told him: "Hey, if this writing thing doesn't pan out, you could always be a reacher in a supermarket. I thought, Reacher — good name”. Some books in the Reacherseries are written in first person, while others are written in the third person. Grant has characterised the books as revenge stories – "Somebody does a very bad thing, and Reacher takes revenge" – driven by his anger at the downsizing at Granada. Although English, he deliberately chose to write American-style thrillers.

  In 2007, Grant collaborated with 14 other writers to create the 17-part serial thrilleThis was broadcast weeklbetween 25 September 2007 and 13 November 2007.

  On 30 June 2008, it was announced that Grant would be taking up a Visiting Professorship at thefrom November 2008. In 2009, Grant funded 52 Jack Reacher scholarships for students at the university.Grant was elected president of then 2009.

  Grant's prose has been described as "hardboiled" and "commercial" in style. A 2012 interview suggested that many aspects of the Jack Reacher novels were deliberately aimed at maintaining the books' profitability, rather than for literary reasons. For instance, making Jack Reacher have one parent who was French was suggested as being partly because the presence of only American members of Reacher's family would limit the series' appeal in France. The same interview stated that Grant "didn't apologise about the commercial nature" of his fiction.

  In a smallcity a lone gunman in a parking garage calmly fires into a rush hour crowd in a public plaza, committing a massacre of five apparently random victims with six shots. The shooter leaves a perfect trail behind for the police to quickly track him down. Evidence from the scene, of a shell case and a bearing the same fingerprints, points clearly to James Barr, a former Army and gets on a bus to Indiana. Reacher has no job, no home, no car, and a shrinking savings account from his past military pay. Although Reacher has aexistence, what he does have is sharp moral clarity in a modern climate of moral ambiguity.

  Instead of clearing Barr, Reacher wants to assist the prosecution in convicting him. There are good reasons why Reacher is the last person Barr would want to see. When Reacher was an investigating Military Policeman years past, Barr had gone on a killing spree similar to the Indiana shootout, murdering four men during theConvoluted military politics and a technicality let Barr walk free. Reacher swore he would track the sniper down if he ever tried it again. Reacher believes Barr is guilty but Barr's sister Rosemary is convinced of her brother's innocence and entreats lawyer Helen Rodin to defend her brother. Helen's father is the district attorney who will prosecute the case.

  When Reacher arrives in Indiana, Barr has been beaten so badly whilst in prison that he can't remember anything about the day of the murders, leaving Reacher to form his own conclusions with the available evidence. The local news reporter, Ann Yanni, is also looking for more information and Reacher is more than willing to include her in his investigation, in exchange for the use of her car and a guaranteed public expose on the Barr case. Reacher knows that 35 yards, the parking garage shooting distance to the victims, is point-blank range for a trained military sniper like Barr. Reacher also knows the shooter missed one shot on purpose, giving Reacher one shot at the truth.

  Reacher drives tto the shooting range where the sniper practiced and learns some interesting facts from Gunny Samuel Cash, the former who owns the shooting range, which make him doubt the solidity of the presumably airtight case against Barr. Cash is unwilling to reveal information or his records to Reacher but grudgingly agrees to talk if Reacher is able to hit a paper target dead center at 300 yards with one shot. After he succeeds, Reacher is shown 32 sheets of target paper from three years' worth of Barr's practice shootings at his range, every single sheet with dead-on maximum scores.

  After the visit to the shooting range, Reacher adds Cash's information to the case evidence. Helen and Rosemary sift through the clues in a riveting analysis and finally get Reacher to conclude that Barr is innocent, which means someone set up Barr as the sniper. Someone is also trying to get Reacher off the case, which formerly seemed a slam-dunk but is now falling apart. Reacher is teamed with Helen, the young defense lawyer working against her D.A. father with a prosecution team that has an explosive secret of its own.

  Reacher gets closer to the unseen enemy pulling the strings, leading him to the real perpetrators, a Russian gang masquerading as legitimate businessmen.

  The gang's eighty-year-old capo spent much of his life in one of the infamous Soviet Gulags and is known only as the Zec. Reacher outwits the mob guards in the Russian gang's fortress, efficiently and brutally dispatching five hoods before confronting the boss and forcing him to come clean on the conspiracy from beginning to end.