We review another one of the Jack Reacher novels. We have reviewed quite a few earlier. See for example, Persuader and Without Fail, the last two we reviewed.
This book has many elements you have come to expect in a Jack Reacher novel but yet, for me, it did not fully click. More on that later. Let us see the story first.
Ken Kramer dies of heart attack in a hotel. Jack reacher is manning the phones for the army. He gets the news and Ken being a general and having died under shady circumstances in a cheap hotel ostensibly for sex with a cheap prostitute, the army, is asked to go and quietly hush it up and ‘get the body back from the police’. He goes to look at the scene and realizes that there is more to it than meets the eye. He quietly takes permission to take the body back from a harried and overstretched policeman who made the call.
He reports back that it is odd that the General’s briefcase is missing as is his wallet. The wallet could have been taken by the hooker but the suitcase, if she had taken it even just to check inside for any valuables, could have contained secret information.
He finally takes another officer to ‘give the news’ to the widow who was living in another state – she was abroad but had come back for vacation – but when they reach the house, they find the wife murdered too. Too much of a coincidence, that.
The deduce that the General’s death was ‘probably’ as it seemed, especially since the medical examiner, who seemed very competent, ruled out any kind of induced heart attack or found no signs of a hypodermic needle but suspected that the wife’s death was related. The missing suitcase was still a problem, and so was the disappearance of two others from the general’s unit who were going to attend the same security conference as he did. And there was this puzzle of why he had to drive over 400 miles to find his whore in the cheap hotel. A lot of unknowns.
He goes back to the club to try and find the whore who was with the general and causes mayhem in the club to get his way. The usual tough guy stuff and as usual interesting and electrifying.
Joe Reacher, Jack’s brother, lets him know that their mother is dying so they go to Paris to see her. Lee Child ties in the adventure in each US city – different every time – in each book with a personal connection too. This layers the personal and professional and works as a winning formula. I guess it humanizes the otherwise fighting and thinking machine that Jack Reacher is, and increases the empathy of you as a reader with him.
He is back but is arrested and bullied by a new general who had taken over who urges him off the case. This only increases Reacher’s resolve. Since the new general came from the army, his brother Joe, in a phone call, confirms that he is a well known asshole. The general wants to punish him for getting into brawls – some army guy who was watching definitely ratted on him – but decides not to do anything out of respect for Reacher’s exemplary record.
When he goes back to the girl who was helping him, he learns that the only woman who could have visited the general has an iron clad alibi. Her name is Norman (last name). When another corpse turns up, he makes Norman see the body and she now is frightened. She wants to talk to Reacher.
They agree that it is staged. Reacher is warned to lay off the case by his own new boss but that of course makes Reacher more determined to get to the truth. He finds out that the two colleagues, Vassell and Coomer, were in the army compound on the day that the witness (who ratted out Reacher and was also the man killed inside the army grounds) was killed.
Reacher tries to get Summer, a new cadet to back off as this is now ‘off the grid’ but she insists on helping him. They then suspect a Bulgarian who was conveniently absent at the exact time of the killing of the last person but they realize that he was simply scaring off an abusive husband.
Therein lies the problem with this book. They seem to go aimlessly around. Yes, there is pressure on Reacher to stop his investigation but they simply keep looking and investigating, adn this reads like the police procedural – dull and convoluted unlike his earlier books, and it simply requires some patience to get through.
All the talk about crowbars and movement of a key ally to Germany and Reacher’s brave rebellion against the tyrant boss Willard makes good reading but does not move the story an inch forward. They simply seem to be running around looking into papers, talking to people and generally getting nowhere for the better part of the book. An unusual offering from the normally razor sharp storytelling style of Lee Child.
The detection, when it comes, is still good. He deduces through reasoning what exactly could have happened and he realizes too his mistakes in his earlier investigation. All good stuff but the setting and the story involves a lot of running around and the pressure builds up with his boss chasing him and the girl who believes in him and shares his vision (and his bed – this is a Reacher novel after all).
Finally, he figures out and arrests the two Coomer and Wallis. When he goes after Marshall, the whole thing changes because that man will not come out placidly and stays holed up in a concrete building with holes. And a cat and mouse game begins.
The end is thrilling and his deductions are good but all this wandering around earlier seems to set our minds up already that this is not as taut as could be.
5/10
= = Krishna
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