“You do not mess with the special investigators.”
Running Blind, A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child →
Reacher starts out helping a restaurant owner in New York avoid the extortion tactics of a local gangs. What he did comes to the attention to the FBI, but they have another important crime to solve
Retired from the Army and living alone, Amy Callan and Lieutenant Caroline Cook are found dead in their own home, in baths filled with Army-issue camouflage paint and with their bodies completely unmarked.
The FBI’s psychological profile expert is convinced, and has convinced her coworkers, that Jack Reacher had motive and was guilty of killing Amy and Caroline. It seems like an astounding conclusion at first, but she has facts that the FBI help her make work. When it is finally clear that he didn’t do it, the FBI frames and threatens him into helping them.
What have these women have in common, and why is someone out to do them harm, is where Reacher starts when he agrees to help, but he indeed seems to be, as the book title suggests, “Running Blind”?
This is book #4 in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series and Jack is trying to decide what to do with house he inherited and a young woman he has loved since childhood from book #3. Either of these books could stand alone and hold your interest but the resolution to these questions is welcomed in this book.
The plot twists and turns with his search for the killer but this book stands out from the 15 others I have read before reading and reviewing this book. The puzzle of who the killer is and how it was done is fascinating.
True to form for a Lee Child plot and a book you will not want to put down, of course.
Past Tense, A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child
Past Tense, A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child, delivers insight into the Reacher family’s history, going back to the place of birth for his father. The trip leaves him on foot in the middle of rural New Hampshire, walking where he has to choose at a fork in the road between going to Portsmouth or Lacona.
Thirty miles away from the town, a young Canadian couple has car trouble and stops at a small motel buried on a small road in the forest where they are only guests. They find the motel unsettling, and Child leaves us just as uncertain about their fate for much of the book. This is a noticeable change in the past plots that work well.
Reacher finds questionable evidence of his father’s existence, but a 75-year-old assault case named Stan Reacher is called surprising, similar to some trouble Reacher finds in town. He wakes up from a sound sleep from a noise below the threshold of consciousness, prompted to find and help a woman under attack, and gives her assailant a beating. The assailant has a similar profile to the assault cases victim found on his father’s police records.
More connections are found, and they take him, just in time, to the strange motel where the Canadian couple desperately needs him.
This Reacher story has some new plot twists and holds our interest ultimately.
