Gone Tomorrow, A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child →

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Early one morning, on a nearly empty Manhattan Lexington Avenue subway car, Jack Reacher notices a woman passenger he suspects is a suicide bomber. She matches the 12-point profile perfectly, but he dismissed the thought. “Not because of racial profiling. White women are as capable of craziness as anyone else.”  He thought the timing was wrong and had “tactical implausibility.”

He was wrong, and it led to him finding himself on the trail leading back to the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The story takes place mainly in New York City and has urban poetry that analyzes the streets and buildings as if they were just a jungle to traverse, using strength and guile to win.

Child continues to surprise us with the twists and turns of his plots, but “Gone Tomorrow,” book 13, introduces in an unexpected way how we see evil manifest itself.

See Literary Favorites Section: Lee Child click here

Quotes

“Delta is full of guys who can stay awake for a week and walk a hundred miles and shoot the balls off a tsetse fly, but it’s relatively empty of guys who can do all that and then tell you the difference between a Shiite and a trip to the latrine.” 

“Look, don't see, listen, don't hear. The more you engage, the longer you survive.”

“Delta is full of guys who can stay awake for a week and walk a hundred miles and shoot the balls off a tsetse fly, but it’s relatively empty of guys who can do all that and then tell you the difference between a Shiite and a trip to the latrine.” 

“Look, don't see, listen, don't hear. The more you engage, the longer you survive.” 

"Before criticizing someone, you should walk a mile in his shoes. Then, when you start criticizing him, you’re a mile away, and he’s got to run after you in his socks." 

Will The Real Jack Reacher Please Stand Up

Without Fail a Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child →

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“Without Fail”, Lee Child’s sixth book, takes place after a Presidential election with threats being made against Vice President-elect Brook Armstrong, the junior senator from North Dakota.

M.E.Froehlich  is in charge of the secret service team assigned to protect Armstrong. She wants to make sure he is safe and she wants to find someone with the real life skill to test that. It doesn’t take her long to think of Jack Reacher because she had been the girlfriend of his brother Joe (see Killing Floor book one) and she had a clear idea of how effective he would be.

Jack has no home address, travels without identification, luggage or credit cards, and Froelich’s efforts to find him required her government connections. When she first meets him, she says: "I want to hire you to assassinate the Vice President of the United States." When he learns that she just wants the VP’s defenses tested, he agrees. A few days later he returns reporting and showing pictures of how many ways he found to have penetrated Armstrong’s security.

With the test behind him Reacher is drawn into an active criminal plot where he needs to find someone who really is after the Vice President. It becomes clear that whoever is behind this has put a lot of time and work into a plan, intent on killing. Reacher is confident in his ability to solve the mystery but the Secret Service has drawn different conclusions and then with problems they have to pass the lead to the FBI.   Reacher sees what they don’t and sets off on his own.

The criminal plot and the serious threat it presents is clear long before a motive is. Reacher is the one that finds the motive.  The weakness of the story is really that the motive and some of the focus of the threat are not realistic perhaps not believable. Even with that weakness in the plot the Reacher character’s approach is to respond breaking down in every changing detail, down to a second by second accounting of the progress. This pulls us into the story, raises the tension and holds our interest to the end.

Quotes

“A good coat is like a good lawyer. it covers your ass.” 

“problem shared is a problem halved.” 

See Literary Favorite Section for more about Lee Child and links to his other book reviews - click here

Killing Floor A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child →

 

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The Killing Floor starts after Reacher has spent his entire life in the military, serving all over the world. He is thirty-six months into civilian life after being honorably discharged, with no ties to anyone or anywhere, traveling aimlessly around the country.

Reacher finds himself in Margrave, Georgia, where he gets off a bus, makes a last-minute decision about even going to this town, walks into town, goes into a diner to have breakfast, and is immediately arrested for murder.  Reacher finds himself in the town jail with a local banker, but they are both taken to the area prison to sit out the weekend. They are told they will be on the 6th floor, where weekenders from town are held, but they are taken to the 3rd floor and left for the night by mistake.  

The next morning, they are both approached by violent prisoners intent on killing them. This is only the first experience of Killing Floors in this story, but thanks to Reacher, they remain alive, and the apparent plot does not work. Both men are released a day early.

Finlay and Roscoe, an attractive lady officer from the police department, had worked hard to verify Reacher’s alibi and cleared him, but they also learned that one of the men he was accused of murdering was his own brother, who was working undercover for the Treasury Department in the area. Reacher can see that these two, along with a friend at the FBI, are the only ones he can trust.  He moves in with Roscoe and is determined to find out what happened to his brother.  

The town is the center of a huge Treasury Department investigation, and everything is secret. Margrave is a town on a payroll with manicured lawns, successful businesses with no customers, and everything polished and perfect: they all seem to be in on something.

They learn that counterfeiting is involved and that a deadline for something big is coming in a few days. Reacher and his new friends uncover a huge-scale criminal operation. The bad guys don’t tolerate mistakes, and they brutally kill those they can’t trust who cross them.

Reacher and Finlay eventually solve the mystery.

Lee Child’s Reacher character is presented as very strong, professional, and a good guy who is patient and cautious: he has no hesitation about killing the bad guys. Like the town of Margrave, the story is a little too neat. If this is the first book you read about Jack Reacher, it may be a while before you get hooked on this series, but it will happen.  

Quotes

“No, I'm a man with a rule. People leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don't, I don't.” 

“A person less fortunate than yourself deserves the best you can give because of duty, honor, and service. Do you understand those words? You should do your job right, and you should do it well, simply because you can, without looking for notice or reward.” 

“I'm a rich man. To have everything you need is the definition of affluence.” 

“I'm not afraid of death. Death's afraid of me.”