Andrew Bourelle is the author of the novel
Heavy Metal and coauthor with James Patterson of
Texas Ranger and
Texas Outlaw. His short
stories have been published widely in literary magazines and fiction anthologies. He is an associate professor of English at the University of New Mexico.
Bourelle's new novel is
48 Hours to Kill.
[
Q&A with Andrew Bourelle]
At CrimeReads Bourelle tagged four of his favorite ticking-clock thrillers, including:
61 Hours by Lee Child
Lee Child’s fourteenth Jack Reacher book is a race-against-the-clock thriller that, like [Stephen King's] The Running Man, gives the reader a clock that the protagonist isn’t aware of. The first two sentences of the book (or sentence fragments, to be precise) state the countdown from the outset: “Five 
minutes to three in the afternoon. Exactly sixty-one hours before it happened.” Even though we don’t know what “it” is, we’re told right from the start by this third-person omniscient narrator that something is going to happen in exactly sixty-one hours. As Jack Reacher (whose description actually does resemble Arnold Schwarzenegger) investigates a small-town murder in South Dakota, we’re continually reminded of the countdown—at first every hour, and then every few minutes. Reacher doesn’t know the countdown exists, creating a special kind of tension. Like Hitchcock’s bomb-under-the-table example, readers see the proverbial “bomb” the whole time and squirm uncomfortably as we turn the pages, waiting for Reacher to figure out he’s on a collision course with something big, even if we don’t yet know what it is.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
61 Hours is among
Allie Reynolds's seven chilling snowy thrillers.
--Marshal Zeringue
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