There are many ways to r“What kind of book is this?” he asked.
I thought about the answer to that a moment.
“What kind of book is this?” he asked again.
There are many ways to respond to that question. I should think about this for a second longer.
“What kind of book is this?” he asked a third time.
It’s the kind of book that has somebody repeating questions a whole bunch of times while other characters ponder things so if you’re already irritated you should probably avoid it.
Ex-military policeman Jack Reacher has been living in Key West where he’s earning a living digging swimming pools, and his idea of a good time is drinking a bunch of mineral water. (No, seriously.) Reacher has no interest in disrupting his quiet routine, but when a private investigator comes around looking for him it kicks off a chain of events which eventually lead Reacher into digging up the secrets of a murderous man in New York City with a dark history that leads back to the Vietnam War.
My experience with this series is weird. I hated the first book, but people I trust told me the series gets much better. Then I saw the Jack Reacher movie and enjoyed it quite a bit so I tried the second book, and it was OK but still didn’t blow my hair back. So here I am trying the third one, and it had about two dozen things that made me roll my eyes. Yet I didn’t absolutely hate it.
I get the appeal of these. The idea of the manliest man to ever walk the face of the earth randomly stumbling into adventures is fun if you like a certain style of action thriller. Child has made big improvements in these early books already like moving from first person to third means that I don’t have Reacher himself telling me how awesome he is on every page. Plus, he’s scaled back the idea that Reacher is a Sherlock Holmes level of detective genius who can make incredible leaps based on the slimmest of clues.
The core story here is pretty good, but as with the first couple of books there’s a constant parade of things that are just so ridiculous or outright stupid that they take me out of the story. One of the biggies is that the main villain in this is a complete cartoon sadist straight out of James Bond with a burned and scarred face as well as a hook used in place of an amputated hand, and it’s so far over the top that it’s hard to take him or the book seriously.
There’s also a very icky subplot where Reacher reconnects with the daughter of his old Army mentor who has recently died. Jodie was a teenage girl, and Reacher was in his mid- twenties when they were around each other back in the day. Yet it becomes very clear that they both had that the hots for each other, and they both still have these old feelings. Child spends a lot of time justifying and rationalizing this plot, and yeah, now they’re both adults and nothing physical happened when she was underage. But it’s just so unnecessary to play it this way.
Why couldn’t Jodie have been in college and Reacher only a few years older when they met and were attracted to each other? Then it’s not an issue at all and makes Reacher far less creepy. (The only thing I can think of is that Child had a Hollywood idea of what a couple in this kind of story looks like, and god forbid we have a lady over thirty hooking up with the hero even though he’s pushing forty himself.)
Another thing is that the book constantly contradicts itself and then goes out of its way to underline that it’s doing so in the most forehead slapping way possible. For example, at one point Reacher thought he knew how some thugs would come after him and Jodie. Yet they use a different tactic which takes him by surprise and almost works. Afterword, Reacher calmly notes that he hadn’t thought about them doing that which was almost a fatal mistake. Yet later in the book when it looks like an assumption that he made was wrong Reacher has a complete meltdown about it where he bemoans the loss of his once perfect record at following his hunches and wonders what he’s supposed to do in life now that his skills have so obviously failed him. So Reacher shrugs off making an error that almost gets them killed, and yet when a blue sky guess he made that has no immediate potential impact looks like it might be wrong he falls apart.
There’s lots more like that, but I’m going to spoiler tag these next few. I’m not giving up the ending, just some things that happen along the way. (view spoiler)[
I mentioned at the start of this review how Child had a habit of characters repeating questions constantly. Reacher is as bad as anyone else in the book about making people ask the same question over and over without answering as well as repeating himself multiple times. In fact, at a climatic point in the book when someone has called him with critical information Child has Reacher asks this person to explain it to him FOUR TIMES to be sure he understands it.
Then in the next chapter Reacher has beaten up a bad guy that he desperately needs information from. He essentially tells the guy to help him or die. The bad guy refuses. Reacher again states that the guy will either help him or die. Then Reacher remembers how his mentor once told him, “Ask once. Ask twice if you have to, but by God never ask a third time!” And so he immediately breaks this guy's neck.
I guess it’s a good thing Reacher decided to ignore that rule when he made someone repeat themselves FOUR TIMES in the previous chapter or else he might have had to kill himself on the spot.
Another example, at one point Reacher and Jodie do some traveling as part of their investigation. First they go to St. Louis where Reacher makes buddies with an Army guy named Conrad in charge of a records department. This leads them to Dallas, and the next clue makes Reacher insist that they have to go to Hawaii even though Jodie has to be back in New York the following day for her job. (They have been attacked by bad guys so it does make sense that Reacher doesn’t want her traveling alone.) This trip involves a whole lot of airline miles, and only gives them four hours in Honolulu before having to jump on another plane back to New York.
There is absolutely no reason that they couldn’t go to New York to keep Jodie’s appointment first, and then fly to Honolulu. There is a clock on the bad guy’s side of things, but Reacher doesn’t know that. There’s no logical story reason for him to demand that they go to Hawaii right that second, but that’s what Child needs for the plot to work so that’s what they do.
In Hawaii they meet an old Army friend of Reacher’s and eventually some information is gathered in another ridiculous scene where the guy at first won’t tell him anything because it’s classified, then he makes Reacher deduce a few things from looking at some recovered remains of servicemen, and then he just goes ahead and tells them the whole story anyhow. Then they jump on a plane to New York. After arriving there Reacher gets some more information which causes him to say, “I have to go back to St. Louis.”
What we learn later as part of the twist at the climactic moment is that Reacher doesn’t actually go to St. Louis but is still in New York. Why didn’t he go? And this is the actual quote in the book: “Why fly himself all the way down there when there were telephones, and he had already built a working relationship with Conrad?”
So the guy who made another person fly from Dallas to Honolulu to New York just to meet with an old friend of his for four hours suddenly realizes that telephones exist and that he can call up people to get information on them, particularly if you actually know the person at the other end of the line.
And you can’t even say that Reacher viewing the remains in Honolulu was critical because he just figures out what his old buddy already knew, and that’s not even the really important part of the story. The classified stuff that the guy finally gives up is the key stuff. Which he could have done OVER THE GODDAMN TELEPHONE!
There’s another factor that made me cringe a few times while reading, but this wasn’t Child's fault. The book was published in 1999, and the main villain has an office in the World Trade Center which is where a lot of the action takes place. Plus, at one point Reacher pays cash an airline ticket to New York using a fake name. Those were big reminders that the world was a very different place back then, and while there’s no way Child could have known what was coming it does give the book an uncomfortable vibe at times.
There are other nitpicks to make, but these are the major ones that took what started out as a very solid action thriller/mystery and turned into a hot mess. Child has storytelling skills, and at their best these books are a hoot. But did no editor every look at this and suggest some changes that would tighten up the story and keep him from highlighting the things that don’t make sense? It would have helped a lot....more
Since I despised the first Jack Reacher novel Killing Floor you may be wondering why I read this second entry in this series. It’s all Tom Cruise’s faSince I despised the first Jack Reacher novel Killing Floor you may be wondering why I read this second entry in this series. It’s all Tom Cruise’s fault.
Yeah, I know the Reacher fans were generally unhappy with Tiny Tom being cast as their hero who is supposed to be 6’5”, but I actually enjoyed the movie adaptation Jack Reacher quite a bit. Believe it or not a big chunk of the credit goes to Cruise who managed to convey the cocky arrogance needed while making it entertaining instead of over the top.* Plus, several people whose book judgment I trust have told me that the series got better over time so I figured I’d give Lee Child another shot. Besides, it could be another opportunity for me to be trolled by the hardcore Reacher fans, and who can resist that?
Jack Reacher is a former military policemen who is the baddest bad-ass who has ever bad-assed. Now retired he wanders around the country off the grid while making a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Reacher is walking down a Chicago street when he sees a young woman with an injured leg struggling to deal with her cane and the dry cleaning she just picked up so he tries to help her out. Suddenly armed gunmen show up and force them into a car. Reacher has just gotten swept up into a kidnapping plot that has huge implications for the U.S. government. The cherry on top of that scene is that Reacher thinks that he wouldn't have any problems taking out the gunman one-handed because apparently he doesn't deem the problem worth dropping the dry cleaning he's holding, but he's worried about stray bullets going into a crowd of people behind him so he decides to play along.
I did like this one a lot more than Killing Floor. It helped that Reacher is thrown into a scenario more fitting of an action hero rather than splitting time trying to play detective. Switching from the first person narrative to third person here is also a big improvement s because rather than the main character telling us how awesome he is we get to either see it or have it relayed from an outsider’s perspective.
The plot still seems like something lifted from an action movie and doesn’t bear much scrutiny even though it gets the job done. I was questioning several points like (view spoiler)[how the U.S. president is so concerned with politics that he turns a blind eye to a group of murderous conspiracy nut jobs who have kidnapped the daughter of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I know this was written pre-9/11 shortly after the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents, but it was also after the Oklahoma City bombing (Which is never mentioned.) so it seems crazily unrealistic to think that the government would just try to ignore these yahoos. (hide spoiler)]
As in the first book at one point Reacher makes an intuitive leap of logic that would make Sherlock Holmes say, “Damn! How’d you pull that out of your ass?” There’s also a sex scene that induces enough eye rolling to cause the reader to make an appointment with their optometrist. (view spoiler)[ Reacher and Holly apparently find being forced to pull the tortured remains of a crucified man off a couple of trees and burying him a tremendous turn-on. (hide spoiler)]
Still, the flaws here are the kinds of things you’d expect from the genre and not the pure stupidity of the first book. That makes me think that maybe this series is worth a read after all.
* I also give writer/director Christopher McQuarrie a lot of the credit for crafting an entertaining action/crime thriller. McQuarrie also had a hand in two crime movies I love. He wrote the screenplay for The Usual Suspects and wrote/directed The Way of the Gun, one of my favorite movies that almost no one has ever heard of....more
This reads like an '80s action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
A big tough ex-military guy drifts into a small town and is sucked into uncoveringThis reads like an '80s action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
A big tough ex-military guy drifts into a small town and is sucked into uncovering a vast criminal conspiracy through completely unbelievable coincidences. - Check.
Hero has a cool, manly sounding name: Jack Reacher. - Check
Hero is quickly given a personal grudge against the villains. - Check
Bad dialogue. - Check.
Stereotypical villains including corrupt businessmen and politicians. - Check.
Hero finds a few trustworthy allies, but is betrayed at some point. -Check
Hero shacks up with hottest girl in town within two days of meeting her. - Check
Hot girl gets kidnapped by bad guys at some point. - Check.
Stuff blows up real good at the end. - Check.
I know this is a really popular series these days, but unless it gets a lot better in later books, I just don't get it. I've read far better action scenes from guys like John Sandford who actually write thrillers that have plots that hang together and don't trot out every action movie cliche in the process. Plus, there are massive gaps in logic. A murder victim turns out to be a federal agent who is working on a super-secret case that is so important that it literally threatens the United States. Yet, after he's killed and it's reported, nobody else from the government even shows up to check it out. WTF? I can gloss over unrealistic procedural stuff in the interest of a good story, but since this isn't a good story, the plot loopholes are too horrible to ignore.
Another problem is that Child couldn't make up his mind if he wanted to write just an action novel or a detective story, and he tried to split the difference. Not good.
Reacher is the worst fictional detective I've ever read. Giant clues are put in front of him that anyone who has ever read a book or seen an episode of television since 1962 would instantly recognize, but he misses them. Yet, when called for, he can make ludicrous leaps of intuition that would make Sherlock Holmes scratch his head at the sheer implausibility of them. This might have been a better book if Reacher was just a revenge driven killing machine mowing through the bad guys without the pretense of playing detective.
This would have been 1 star, but I gave it an extra star because the main piece of the criminal plot is actually kind of clever and not something I'd read before. Unfortunately, it's the only original thing in this book.*
* Update 4/10/16 - I recently read another crime novel that used an identical idea of (view spoiler)[ bleaching $1 bills to use for counterfeiting purposes (hide spoiler)]. Since that book was published 36 years before this one it seems a lot less original then I initially thought so I took away that second star.
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