Category Archives: Book Review

This is the 22nd book in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series and it continues where the 20th book, Make Me, finished. Any hope that Reacher’s collaborator in the previous book, Michelle Chang, would feature again were immediately dashed – but Reacher does work with an ad- hoc team in this one, and those tend to be the best of his adventures.

The premise of the book is that Reacher sees a small West Point ring in a pawn shop and decides to track down the (presumed female) owner and return it to her. Being an alumni himself, he feels a duty to help someone down on their luck. He allies himself with a detective, Terry Bramall, who also happens to be looking for the owner of the ring – employed by the beautiful sister of the owner. Finding the woman is only the beginning – the issues causing her to pawn the ring (battlefield injuries and drug addiction) are far harder to solve.

The next book in the series will be called Yesterday.

In a recent interview on BBC Radio 4, Lee Child was asked why Jack Reacher gets into so many tricky situations. The answer was simple – he keeps to himself pretty much all of the time, but a couple of times a year, trouble comes his way and he can’t leave it alone. Child has had no luck selling the idea of Reacher sitting drinking coffee all day to a publisher – so only the exceptional days get told in his books.

This book starts with Reacher drinking coffee in New York, minding his own business. A short time later, he’s in a swanky apartment helping to investigate the kidnap of a man’s wife and daughter. The first 24 hours are vital to the hunt – and Reacher is a witness who can help track down the mercenaries who took them.

Quickly, though, we find that all is not as it seems. The husband searching for his family is himself a shady character; a mysterious woman in an apartment opposite is keenly watching the comings/goings from the flat; the ransom demands jump up in multiples of millions, yet are paid in cash with little thought. As ever, it’s the details that matter – Jack Reacher misses little and is on hand to exact appropriate retribution.

This is a collection of short stories featuring Jack Reacher. Despite reading a few negative reviews, I found this book pretty good. I’m sure a lot of Jack Reacher fans will be interested to read about Reacher’s childhood – but I can imagine it would have been hard to explore that in a complete novel.

“Second Son” is set when Reacher is 13 and newly arrived at a military base. Whilst his upbringing is mentioned in other books, the relocation from one base to another is shown to be a big part of his life. He has to find his feet pretty quickly when surrounded by openly hostile kids – and his loathing for running means that in a fight-or-flight situation, the choice is already made.

“High Heat” is set a few years later – Reacher goes to the city at 16, purely to look around before visiting his brother. As a man, we see that he gets involved whenever he witnesses an injustice – as a young man, he was already inserting himself into adult conflicts, and somehow coming out on top despite tough odds.

“James Penney’s new Identity” stands out because Jack Reacher is really incidental to the main plot – I don’t think Lee Child has written many books without Reacher (any?), but this shows that he has more than enough ideas if he wanted to invent another character. But Reacher is so popular, you can’t blame him for giving the public what they want.

The best stories are at the start – the last few are shorter too, but by then I’d had a great time reading the book anyway.