Make Me by Lee Child

While I was at the library, picking up a novel I'd reserved, I fortuitously saw the latest Reacher novel by Lee Child on the New Books shelf, and immediately snapped it up. I started reading it an hour or so before bedtime, and kept on an hour past, hoping to find out what happened to Reacher, or mor accurately...what Reacher happened to.

In his perpetual wanderings, Reach steps off a train in the middle of flyover country, in a little town called Mother's Rest, mostly because he's curious about the backstory behind the name of the town. He figures he'll stay overnight, check out the local historic museum, and be on his way. Coincidentally (that madness or method upon which dozens of Jack Reacher's adventures hinge), a private investigator named Keever who has a close physical resemblance to Reacher has just been murdered nearby, and his partner, Michelle Chang, a former FBI agent, interests our hero enough to get him to stay a bit longer to look into the disappearance.

Things proceed according to the usual sequence. Local thugs try to intimidate Reacher and end up in the hospital for their troubles. Professional help is brought in to make it clear to him that he's not welcome poking his nose into other people's business, and things escalate in intensity and level of violence necessary from that point forward until the final battle, when all the mysteries become clear.

Reacher and Chang's investigation take them to Chicago in search of a possible crank-case conspiracy theorist who contacted Keever, all the way to L.A. to consult a journalist who may have written an article which sheds light on the nature of the conspiracy, and to Phoenix for a violent confrontation with the Ukrainian mafia. Good ole Jack Reacher times!

Personal by Lee Child

 The first half dozen pages of this novel, I'm thinking, "Hasn't Child already written this story - One Shot?" Turned into the weak plot of a movie starring Tom Cruise as Reacher? And the rights have been sold to make nine Reacher movies? Dear God, please let them find someone believeable to play Reacher - and soon!

But I digress.

A very skilled sniper appears to be "auditioning" for a job, which probably involves taking shots at one or more of the world leaders scheduled to appear soon at the G8 summit in London. The French, Russian, British and U.S. intelligence services have narrowed the suspects down to a half-handful of ex-military snipers from the U.S., U.S.S.R., and U.K., who are unaccounted for. The American is a former Army shooter who Reacher put away in jail sixteen years ago - for a fifteen year sentence.

When a general whom Reacher owes a favor contacts him and asks him to track down the sniper and stop him, it's an offer he can't really refuse - especially when he finds the rural hideout where the sniper has been shooting at targets of Reacher's head for months on end. This story, of course, just wouldn't fly without the addition of a female sidekick for our hero, and he gets a "rookie" from the State Department as his "minder", though it's not certain who's minding whom over the long haul.

The action moves swiftly to France, then London, and there are the usual  plot twists and awesome fight scenes as Reacher plows over the competition, and chases down his target. The final twist was not unexpected, especially if you take the title to heart.

Another fun and quick read from Child

Never Go Back by Lee Child

 Susan Turner is just a pretty voice on the phone, the CO of his old MP command, to Jack Reacher, as he bulls his way through his last adventure, but he decides he needs to see her in person, and ask her out to dinner, so he hitches all the way to the DC area and ventures on base to meet her. When he arrives, however, he discovers that she has been thrown in jail for allegedly accepting bribes and stashing the money in the Cayman Islands, and someone has filed homicide charges against him for the beating death of a suspect he interviewed sixteen years ago. To make sure that Reacher really feels the heat, he's also the target of a paternity suit from a woman he allegedly had sex with while he was in Korea fifteen years before. Whoever is behind all this has made a careful assessment of Reacher's behavior and decided that his tendency would be to take it on the run instead of facing the charges. Bad idea.

When some enlisted thugs come along to encourage him to move on, he shows them his own special brand of encouragement with which we are all familiar. The new, temporary CO of the MP detachment implements an obscure clause of Reacher's enlistment to re-activate his military status (Hmm...wonder why he never gets a paycheck in the course of this book?) and basically confines him to the base. When Jack begins to dig deeper into the case against Turner, he gets framed for the severe beating of Turner's attorney, to add more fuel to the fire.

So it's not unexpected for us Reacher fans when Jack decides to "bend" all the rules, and breaks Susan out of jail, and goes for a walk on the wild side while they both try to figure out whose toes Susan has stepped on that has the access to old files as well as current intel to make criminal cases appear out of thin air against the duo.

In this iteration, we see the Reacher we all know and love create chaos and confusion among his enemies, but we also get to see, perhaps for the first time, a more tender version of Reacher when he travels to Los Angeles to discover the daughter he never knew. Another good (and very fast) read from Child.

A Wanted Man by Lee Child

Reacher rocks again! He just falls into these situations, when he's totally trying to mind his own business. As the story begins, Reacher is standing on the onramp of an Interstate near Omaha, trying to hitch a ride to Virginia to meet up with a woman he only knows from talking to her on the phone. He's sporting a broken nose from his most recent mishaps and adventures, and isn't a likely candidate for most people to pick up in the middle of the night. Finally he's given a ride by three people who claim to be coworkers for an unnamed company, headed home after a long sales trip - two men and a woman.

However, the two men are a pair of murderers being pursued by the local sheriff and the FBI, and the woman is their hostage. The men have threatened to kill her if she tells Reacher anything, but they've picked both him and the women up in order to confuse the law enforcement types on the lookout for two men traveling by themselves. It doesn't take Reacher long to figure out that something is not quite right in this scenario, but before he can do as we expect and rescue the woman from her captors, he is left at a motel in the middle of nowhere after one of the men takes a pistol shot at him and misses, badly.

Reacher eventually hooks up with FBI agent Sorenson, a tough Scandinavian woman with a no-nonsense attitude, who nevertheless falls for Reacher's directness and honesty and agrees not to arrest him while they pursue the fugitives together. The whole situation is not exactly as it seems, and Reacher has stumbled into a massive counterrorism operation being run by a number of TLAs, full of double and triple agents, domestic and foreign terrorists, and just a handful of local yokels caught in the dragnet.

We don't see Reacher's usual emphasis on mano a mano physical combat in this book, but when the action finally comes, it's fast, furious, and bloody. I had a very tough time putting this one down at bedtime.

Oh, by the way, there's a description of Reacher on page 156. It sounds nothing at all like Tom Cruise. What's wrong with film makers these days?

The Affair by Lee Child

This was such a prototypically "Jack Reacher" book in so many ways. First, it turns out to be the prequel of sorts to the first Reacher book published, The Killing Floor. It takes place in 1997, when Reacher is still an MP, before he leaves the Army.

He is sent to a small town in Mississippi, Carter Crossing, which is barely hanging on to existence due to the presence of a military base nearby which is used to train special forces troops. Someone, possibly from the base, has murdered a beautiful young woman in the town, and Reacher is sent go undercover (as much as a brute like him can) outside the fence to find out what the local sheriff knows.

He finds that the sheriff in town is not exactly what he expected - she's a former Marine Corps MP, named Deveraux. She's a little out of her depth in a murder investigation, but Reacher soon brings her up to speed, while trying to maintain the confidentiality he's been sworn to by his CO, Garber. The murder could turn out to be a political hot potato, as the commander on base is the son of Congressman Riley. Reacher soon learns that this is not the first murder with a similar MO, either, the killings started about nine months before his arrival in town.

The book contains the required faceoff between Reacher and some local thugs. As always, he puts them down quickly and efficiently, without doing too much permanent damage. There's a great conversation after the thugs gather four more of their friend to attack Jack in a dark alley. After Jack takes them all on and puts most of them in the hospital, he's talking to Chief Deveraux:

"'I gave them the chance to come back in numbers. And what did they do? They added two more guys. That's all. They showed up with a total of six. What is that about? It's deliberate disrespect.'
Deveraux said, 'I think most people would consider six against one to be fairly respectful.'
'But I warned them. I told them they'd need more. I was trying to be fair. But they wouldn't listen. It was like talking to the Pentagon.'"

I love Reacher.

One of the great things about this character is that he just does what he knows to be the right thing, without respect for what his orders are, whether it's strictly legal or not, or whether anyone agrees with him. He's like an unstoppable force of nature. Reacher readers are going to go absolutely nuts over this one.

Worth Dying For by Lee Child

When last I saw Jack Reacher, he was in a race against time, rushing up an escape ladder from the bottom of an exploding missile silo. Fortunately for my peace of mind, I had seen that the next novel, Worth Dying For, was already in publication, so I rested easy in the knowledge that Reacher would survive. Phew! The theme for the last couple of books, however, has left me wondering if a heart of malignant evil beats in the center of every rural community, as Reacher finds a nest of venomous vipers...er...truckers? in Nowhere Nebraska.

Hitchhiking his way across country, Reacher pauses for the night at the Apollo Inn, with space race themed decor. While enjoying a cup of coffee in the lounge, he gets involved in a doctor's house call which leads him to what would seem a simple case of wife-beating. Since Reacher is well known for sticking his nose in where it doesn't really belong, it's not surprising that he takes the time to track down the errant husband at a local steak house, takes out his bodyguard efficiently in the parking lot, and administers a single blow broken nose to the man.

The man is Seth Duncan, member of a local family that has parlayed a trucking company into dominating and terrifying the whole community. Nobody crosses the Duncans, or they pay for it with beatings, intimidation, or loss of their livelihood - if you can't get your crops hauled to market, there's no point in farming. The Duncan clan figures that Reacher is just your average troublemaker, and so they send a couple of their goons, recruited from Nebraska Cornhusker ex-football players, to make sure he doesn't cause any more trouble. Reacher's past training and experience allow him to put them both in the hospital without breaking a sweat, and the war is on.

The Duncans have something going on, above and beyond their local trucking monopoly, smuggling some sort of high value goods into the country, and they're connected to some criminal enterprises in Las Vegas and beyond. Their associates are concerned about a delay in the shipment, and the Duncans manage to convince them that Reacher is the reason for the delay, so the Vegas bosses also send some killers to Nebraska to deal with the problem.

Just some good, rousing entertainment once again from Lee Child. If you've been wondering how Jack Reacher survived the blast at the missile silo, this question is answered for you, too. Hope he keeps on crusading for many more books.

Short Takes

(9/29/09) I've been reading Robert Novak's autobio, Prince of Darkness, and it is LONG. Interesting stuff about all of the politicians that were around when I was growing up, before I began paying attention to those sorts of things. I'm up to the Nixon administration right now, getting close to Watergate.

(11/4/09) Finished reading the latest Reacher novel, Gone Tomorrow, by Lee Child. Gripping, as always.

(11/4/09) So, I recently finished reading Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazi. One of my favorite PF bloggers was doing a review on it, and I picked it up basically because of the title, as I nearly always eat alone. Figured it might shake up my routine, or something.

Ferrazzi has a lot of good tactics in this book for increasing the size and effectiveness of your personal network. If I was a young man again, starting off in my career, I think I'd take a bunch of this to heart and implement it in my life. As it is, it gave me a few ideas about how to improve some of the relationships in my existing network, and stimulated my thinking about how I see my friends and acquaintances.

A good read, all in all.

61 Hours by Lee Child

I've really enjoyed Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels over the years, beginning with The Killing Floor. Reacher is a former CO of an Army MP branch, who made the decision on leaving the service to become rootless, owning nothing more than the clothes on his back, and with no fixed address, wandering at whim throughout the U.S. Various places where he stops provide the settings for the novels, when Reacher encounters some group of bad guys whom only he has the power to stop. A combination of his investigative instincts and his incredible physical strength and combat training always seems to overcome the odds.


In 61 Hours, Reacher is stranded in midwinter in the small town of Bolton, South Dakota when a tour bus he is riding on slides off the road. A gang of bikers has taken over an old military installation west of town, and has evidently been manufacturing and selling methamphetamine. One of the locals witnessed a drug deal taking place, and the biker involved is in a nearby prison. The police force suspects that someone will be dispatched to kill the witness, and they're faced with the problem of trying to provide 24 hour protection for her, while constrained by an agreement with the nearby federal prison that all of the police force will respond to either a riot in or escape from the prison, which would leave her unprotected, if it happens. When Reacher arrives, the local chief of police and his deputy ask for help.

There is, indeed, a conspiracy in place to remove the inconvenient witness, and at the far end of the spider's web, tugging at the strings, is a Mexican drug lord, Plato. Interspersed through the story, Child has included scenes at Plato's compound that are truly delightful in their depiction of a totally ruthless and amoral criminal. Plato is vertically challenged, only 4'1", and when one of his associates called him a midget, he had him drugged, taken to a local hospital, and his legs sawn off at exactly 4'10" from the top of his head, then sent the family the man's legs, in a fish tank full of formaldehyde. He likes to stake out people who steal from him in the desert with a manacle around one leg, a hatchet nearby, presenting them with the choice of death by exposure, or chopping off their own leg to survive. He laments the fact that his kitchen staff fears and bows down to him at one point, musing to himself that he hasn't harmed any of them, and they have no idea about the graves of their predecessors that are located in the back yard. A wonderful villain!

SPOILER BELOW!!