Persuader by Lee Child

Persuader is number seven in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers that will soon include twenty in the series.  A persuader is a shotgun… the Mossburg M500 paramilitary style 12 gauge shotgun.  With the right load it can ‘punch a hole in a cinder block wall big enough to crawl through.’  It can cut a human being in half.

Reacher is several years retired from the military when a group of ‘off the grid’ DEA agents enlist his services.  Seems as an MP he had a case where the big one got away and cost him some good people.  Lieutenant Colonel Francis Xavier Quinn was high up in military intelligence and was on the take and Reacher’s investigators almost had him… almost.  The arrest went wrong and Quinn escaped and went underground after brutally killing Reacher’s investigators.  Years later Reacher inadvertently spots Quinn in a public place in Boston.  He reports the sighting to one of his old army contacts and is hooked up with this rogue DEA group.  Quinn, now known as Xavier, has started an import export business in Portland, Maine and is selling guns to the highest bidder… mostly drug dealers and terrorists.  He has teamed with Zachary Beck, a wealthy rug merchant to cover his illegal transactions.  Beck lives in a compound on Maine’s rocky coast with his wife, college age son and several security guards.  The DEA planted a young woman in the compound as domestic help but she was found out and is being held.  They want her back and Reacher has the skills and motivation to be of service… he wants Quinn.

Reacher and the DEA guys, fake the kidnapping of Beck’s son (it had happened before) and Reacher appears to save the kid.  That gets his foot in the door of Beck’s compound.  Through diversionary tactics Reacher eliminates Beck’s security force and soon gains Beck’s trust.  But locating the undercover DEA agent and finding evidence to dismember the gun running operation proves more complex and dangerous than even Reacher expected.  But the danger doesn’t bother Reacher… not when he has a chance at redemption.

Persuader is like so many Jack Reacher novels in that Child builds suspense in one situation after another with no anticlimax.  Testosterone charged Reacher carefully studies each situation then blasts ahead with skill and accuracy to neutralize any adversary.  Then without pause moves on to the next precarious situation.  And as one of Child’s earlier works in the series, we get some insight into Reacher’s character.  ‘I don’t really care about the little guy.’ Reacher says, ‘I just hate the big guy.  I hate big smug people who think they can get away with things.’  Don’t we all?