Killing Floor

Killing Floor is the debut novel by Lee Child, first published in 1997 by Putnam. It won the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for best first novel and is set in 1997 in the fictional town of Margrave, Georgia. It introduces Jack Reacher in the first thriller to feature him.

Reacher is a former major in the United States Army's military police who has left the service and lives without an address. He gets off a Greyhound bus in Margrave because he remembers his brother mentioning that a blues musician named Blind Blake had died there, and shortly after he arrives he is arrested in a local diner for murder on the orders of the sheriff, Morrison, who falsely claims to have seen him at the scene.

The book's problem is therefore not the crime but the town. Four novels were later written as prequels, set before the events of this one, but this remains the introduction of the character and the template for the series: a man with no fixed place, arriving in a closed community, obliged to work out what is happening to him. The subjects file it under private investigators, murder, drifters and thrillers.