62 pages • 2 hours read
Lee ChildKilling Floor
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Roscoe picks up Reacher’s personal effects from the police station, and they agree to meet around lunchtime. Reacher spends the morning walking through town, and he is surprised to see how new or newly-refurbished everything is, especially since Margrave is so small. He sees a statue dedicated to a Caspar Teale that “looked like somebody licked it clean every morning” (122). Reacher stops at a convenience store for a cup of coffee, and he reads a newspaper article that says the Coast Guard’s blockade will end on Saturday. A pale, nervous woman enters to order coffee; a man in a black pick-up truck waits outside for her. When she leaves, the store employee tells Reacher that the woman is Mrs. Kliner, and her husband runs the Kliner Foundation that has supported the town for the last five years. The man driving the truck is Kliner’s son from his first marriage. Reacher asks for directions to a barbershop, and he notices the truck is still outside, and Kliner’s son is watching him.
At the barbershop, Reacher asks the owners about Blind Blake. The sister of one of the men used to sing with Blind Blake and many other musicians who came to town. Before the new highway passed by Margrave, it used to be a popular spot on the main road through Georgia. Although the man was not in town when Blind Blake allegedly died, he heard rumors that there was “Some kind of big trouble, got him killed stone dead” (130). After his shave and haircut, Reacher meets up with Roscoe. She tells him Finlay found a second body at the murder scene when he went to look for clues. Finlay soon joins them and orders them both to come with him to the morgue. At the morgue, the medical examiner confirms both bodies belong to the same crime scene. The examiner agrees with Reacher’s theory that there were three men involved in the murders: “a competent shooter, a frenzied maniac, and an incompetent concealer” (138). The second victim’s watch has the name “Sherman” engraved on it, but he carries no other identification. The morgue receives a fax from Officer Stevenson containing the results of the first victim’s fingerprint check. As Reacher looks over the pages, he becomes curious, then concerned, and then he feels an "icy” fear. He says the first victim is his older brother.
Chapter 10 Summary
Reacher is only able to recognize his brother Joe by the star-shaped scar on his neck. Roscoe holds Reacher’s hand the whole way back to the police station. Reacher recalls that despite the way he and Joe irritated each other in childhood, they always felt total loyalty to one another. Reacher decides he needs to do something about whoever murdered his brother. At the station, Finlay asks Reacher for some background on Joe. The last time Reacher saw Joe was at their mother’s funeral seven years prior, and while he knows Joe worked for the Treasury Department, he never knew exactly what Joe did there. Reacher decides not to tell Finlay what Hubble said in prison about Joe being an investigator trying to help him. Reacher asks if Chief Morrison is happy with his alibi holding up, but Finlay says Morrison has not been answering his phone. Reacher goes for a walk. Roscoe follows him outside and agrees to take him by Hubble’s house. No one is home, but as they turn to leave, they see Hubble’s wife, Charlene, pulling in the driveway. She introduces her children, Ben and Lucy, and invites Reacher and Roscoe inside. When they sit down, Roscoe nudges Reacher’s leg with her own; Reacher replays their past interactions and realizes Roscoe likes him too. Roscoe and Charlene make small-talk for a while, and when it becomes clear Hubble will not be home any time soon, Roscoe suggests they leave.
Roscoe invites Reacher to stay with her until Joe’s murder is solved. Reacher kisses her, and they go to her house and have sex. Reacher resolves to find out what Joe was doing in Margrave. After Roscoe leaves for work, Reacher walks through town again. He sees gardeners tending the Caspar Teale statue; their van’s decal reads, “The Kliner Foundation.” Reacher meets Roscoe for lunch at Eno’s, and he sees Kliner’s son watching them from the counter. Reacher also sees the same two waitresses who were working the day he was arrested—one wears glasses and one does not. Roscoe says they identified the second victim as Sherman Stoller, but before she can say more, she steps outside to answer an urgent dispatch. Reacher watches her expression change, and he believes Hubble is dead.
Chapter 11 Summary
Reacher realizes the objective difference between the two waitresses is whether they wear glasses or not. In all other aspects, the two women are nearly identical. Reacher remembers that in prison, Hubble was not wearing his glasses because they were broken, and Reacher was wearing another man’s sunglasses when they were attacked in the bathroom. He recalls that Spivey saw them at intake, when Hubble was wearing glasses and Reacher was not. Reacher determines that Spivey told the lifers to find the new inmates and kill the one wearing glasses, not knowing that Hubble’s were broken. Reacher takes a cab to Hubble’s house, but the driveway is not swarming with police like he expected. Instead, he finds Charlene distraught because Hubble still has not come home. She asks Reacher to help find Hubble. He borrows Hubble’s Bentley and drives to the stationhouse. The officers, including Roscoe and Finlay, are all busy. The only person missing is Chief Morrison. Roscoe is crying and can only say, “It was horrible” (171). Finlay begins telling Reacher about the scene they just came from, where a man was nailed to a wall, his testicles were removed, and his throat was cut ear-to-ear. When Finlay mentions the man’s wife, Reacher says that cannot be possible, since he just saw Charlene. Finlay says the victim is not Hubble—the victims are Chief Morrison and his wife.
Chapter 12 Summary
Reacher is surprised that Finlay will not be promoted to Chief even though he is the highest-ranking officer. The mayor, Grover Teale, will appoint a new Chief soon. Despite the most recent murder victims being Morrison and his wife, Reacher still believes Hubble is also dead. Reacher and Finlay go to the convenience store for coffee. Finlay says he will not be promoted because when he was hired, he was a wreck from his divorce. His friend at the FBI office in Atlanta warned him away from the job, suggesting the department was poorly run and racially biased. Finlay suspects Morrison only hired him to be a “token,” “the first black cop in Margrave history” (179). Reacher asks to see the Morrison crime scene. Finlay says he was first on the scene, since he was looking for Morrison because he had not answered his phone all weekend. Evidence at the scene implies the murders were a team effort, and the people involved wore gloves, rubber overshoes, and nylon bodysuits so they would not leave fingerprints or other identifying traces behind. Reacher searches Morrison’s car and finds an ornately-decorated switchblade knife, which he pockets.
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
These chapters begin by detailing how Margrave became vulnerable to the conspiracy and corruption that has now taken it over. The advancement of interstate highway travel cut Margrave off the main roads, and the increase in airplane travel made it so people could go from Atlanta to other major cities without ever passing by Margrave’s junction. The exclusion of Margrave from main travel routes made the town invisible in such a way that the economy soon began to collapse. Reacher recognizes the sudden financial vulnerability left the town open to criminal influence, and he begins to make the connection between that and the conspiracy Hubble brought Joe in to help him escape. Reacher’s early suspicions about Margrave’s too-perfect façade are proving correct, and the slow discovery of a hidden second-surface evokes a tension between truth and appearance similar to that found in Gothic literature. The threat of something lurking behind a beautiful surface is a common Gothic convention, and it functions as a source of increasing tension in the novel as the barrier between surface and second-surface lessens. The closer the protagonist gets to uncovering a possible secret truth, the more threatening and frightening that discovery becomes.
The revelations in these chapters are substantial to the narrative’s forward momentum, as the identity of the first murder victim is revealed to be Reacher’s older brother Joe. While the novel generally spends more time exploring Reacher’s approach to battle and detailing his deductive reasoning, the scene where he identifies Joe’s body is a rare moment of emotional introspection. Reacher compares his grief to a sudden shift in geography caused by a glacier and pressure under ice. The imagery associates coldness and numbness with his emotions; he is saddened by his brother’s death, of course, but there is also enough distance between the two of them that it does not yet provoke his fiery temper. If anything, it encourages his controlled curiosity, grounding it in something personal. Reacher’s curiosity is provoked, and he feels duty-bound to punish his brother’s killer, but he does not grieve in a way the reader might expect. Reacher channels any feelings he has about Joe’s death into a nearly single-minded pursuit of revenge. Lee Child once called his Reacher books a series of “revenge novels,” and the scene at the morgue solidifies this novel as following a revenge plot as well as a detective story.
Morrison’s death comes as a tremendous surprise, especially considering he and his wife are tortured and killed in the same way Hubble’s threateners promised to hurt his family. The element of humiliation becomes increasingly more intense when the recipient of the cruelty is the town’s chief of police. The violence at the scene is more than just a show of brutality, it is a demonstration of the pleasure the murderers took in the act of killing and a level of shameless arrogance. They could have killed Morrison quickly and alone and left him somewhere public for people to find, but the goal is not public fear. Rather, their intent is to show a select few people how unsafe they really are. The precautions the killers took to prevent themselves being covered in blood and leaving their own contact traces at the scene indicate precision and planning, and Reacher compares the vinyl over suits they likely wore to the protective coveralls a butcher wears on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse.
Related Titles
By Lee Child
