Another book in the Jack Reacher series, many of which we have already reviewed here earlier. For sample, see Persuader or Running Blind. Just like some of the other books, the prolog is short but interesting. It talks about a man (not named) dying of weakness due to lack of food and water.
Meanwhile Reacher goes from Hope (one city) to Despair (another) in Colorado. He wants coffee so he finds the only restaurant in the dinky little town but instead of being served, he is accosted by four people – in typical Reacher novel style!
He calmly orders a coffee and refuses to leave without it! They finally give it to him and he slowly drinks it, savoring every sip. Typical Reacher; typical Lee Child. He flattens one but is arrested by the police. Hauled before a judge, asked to leave town. The police escort him back to Hope where a woman police officer, Vaughan, meets him and asks him to stay away from Despair.
The officer says that they are suspicious of vagrants because the industrialist has the whole town sewn up and does not want newcomers – especially those who are jobless who will be undercutting the rates for casual labour, which will cause trouble in the town.
Reacher, of course, dislikes being told what to do. So at night, he slips over the border back into Despair.
He does surveillance of the factory (which dominates the town) until night. On the way back, in utter darkness, he stumbles into a dead body.
Next he meets the girl called Ann who asked about him and was worried about her boyfriend. He establishes that the boyfriend is not the corpse he stumbled on. When he goes again to meet her in her hotel, she is panicked and refuses to see him anymore or give any information to him, which makes Reacher suspect that she has been threatened by someone.
He then borrows Vaughan’s private truck and goes back to see where the boyfriend and the dead man could have come from, into Despair.
He also knows from Vaughan that there was absolutely no report of finding a dead body in any of the police channels in Despair, despite the fact that he and Vaughan went to the road and found that the body had been removed by (what appeared from the marks on the ground) four people with a gurney.
He then goes back to the place in Vaughan’s private van and puts two policemen who came to stop him in the hospital before returning back. Next he goes there again and goes bravely into a bar and waits for the police to appear. When six of them come in at once he realizes that he may have overreached. But there is no way to back out. Not for Reacher. He puts them all in the hospital but later explains to Vaughan that the odd thing was that they were not fit at all. So, the town is protecting its secret. Why?
Later he drives back to the plant and joins the men to go in. He sees a section of the plant is secluded. He then gets to meet the owner Mr Thurber who indicates that he has checked Reacher out and that he has nothing to hide. He even says that he will give Reacher a tour and does. Except that he does not take him to the locked out part and says that he has just scrap metal there.
Reacher comes out freely allowed by the owner of the factory (and de facto owner of the whole town) to find all the glasses of his pickup smashed by unknown folks. He tells Vaughan that he saw one of the boyfriends of a girl waiting for her boyfriend roaming freely in Despair. So some folks are tolerated and even kept; others are killed; Reacher himself was escorted back. Why?
He goes into the town after realizing that all the folks there are guarding against visitors. When he sneaks in causing a diversion, to the plant, he comes face to face with Mr Thurman, the owner.
He tells Thurman that he is leaving town but goes back in a car with Vaughan at night, with night vision camera turned on but headlights off. (We will skip over the part where he visits Vaughan’s brain dead husband and subsequent sex with her, since the latter is du rigueur for Reacher stories)
They go and investigate the factory but don’t seem to find anything exceptional.
He confronts Thurman again who actually takes him on a tour in his plane!
However, he leaves him behind and flies back, leaving Reacher stranded.
The rest of the story is about how Reacher intuits Thurman’s plans and how, in his ‘never let go’ style, he figures out how to defeat Thurman.
You have all the ingredients there. The staccato style of tense descriptions; the physical and intellectual prowess of Reacher.
The action packed confrontation of Reacher, alone, with multiple bad guys, some of whom are bigger than Reacher and some of them with improvised tools, all at once against him. The devastating descriptions of how Reacher handles them (Yes, of course, this is not a spoiler; he has to overcome and be alive for the next book, right?)
But that undefinable something is missing. There are some surprises (mini twists) but they are not – in my opinion – the shocking turns in some of his earlier books or even plot twists in some other books.
Is this an enjoyable read? Yes, almost all of Reacher books by this author are. Is it one of the best? I would say ‘No’.
6/10
— Krishna
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