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Reacher stumbles into a rural Nebraska county while hitchhiking away from the events in 61 Hours. While drinking coffee at a rural motel bar, he overhears an alcoholic doctor turn down visiting a woman who is experiencing a nosebleed. Reacher keeps his nose out of lots of other people's business, but he suspects the woman is a domestic violence victim and badgers the doctor into visiting, with Reacher along for the ride.

The woman turns out to be the wife of a local county heavy, so Reacher is off on another adventure battling local crime bosses, much like a one man A-Team. Before the end of the book, Reacher aims to end their control, at least the terrorizing people into silence part.

Competence porn at its most ok.

@graue@bookwyrm.social

don't read it as a how to. it's not in depth enough. however, it describes promising work and methods that could be worth further investigation.

Voss premise is that negotiating is an emotional exercise rather than an intellectual one. so he presents a bunch of techniques that he says are designed to subtly play on people's emotional processing. I assume they work well if skillfully wielded, though i can't be sure. but he never puts it all together into a coherent method. the techniques remain a grab bag. lastly, the book does not present any way for the reader to practice the techniques, though he talks about such practice in classes he teaches. consequently all except type a personalities are likely to find it intimidating.

Michael is a male escort catering to women. Stella is an autistic woman who lacks confidence. She hires Michael to teach her how to be better at sex, then to he better at relationships. Of course it turns into more.

But the conflict relies on characters that hear one thing said and assume it means another. lots and lots of that. And each character blows those meanings up into all sorts of drama that could have been avoided by asking what they meant.

Quick read with some humor sprinkled in here and there. Good structure makes it easy to skip sections that one finds boring. Overall it gives a good perspective on the various challenges of space settlements.

Orson Card flipped his lid at criticism that his Ender series was a Hitler apologetic, so he followed it up with a book explicitly subtitled "The Redemption of Christopher Columbus".