Jack Reacher #25.Begins on a bus.
Reacher notices an old guy, mostly asleep, carrying a fat teller's envelope in his jacket pocket. Fat=full of money. Also notices that a skinny low life sees a potential score. Bus stops in a medium sized unnamed city, probably in the midwest. The punk stalks the vic and takes him down. Reacher was following and encourages the chump to seek a score elsewhere.
The vic is gracious. Invites Reacher to his home for coffee and maybe a bite. The guy and his wife appear one day short of being destitute. Reacher finds out they own money to a loan shark - they've been borrowing money to help pay their adult daughter's medical bills.
Said daughter worked for a dot.com entrepreneur. A real genius. Lots of startup backing to bring jobs to town. But the genius was skimming off the top, stopped paying the company's health insurance premiums, thus the daughter was caught off guard with a cancer diagnosis. Business is gone. The CEO has disappeared. The hospital wants payment up front. And cancer ain't cheap. Neither are the loan sharks. Reacher's sense of right and wrong sees someone being wronged.
The town is run by two rival gangs. Ukrainians and Albanians have sort of split the town in half and exist is a shaky truce divided by the main north-south street. Reacher wants to get the debt settled. Problem is he is an unknown. Each side thinks the other is trying to take over. So Reacher just sort of helps things along as only Reacher can. In the background is the failed CEO . . . who just happens to be Ukrainian. Ex-CEO may not be much of a businessman, but he is still a computer genius with skills that some might value.
And that includes a lot of deductive reasoning and a little manipulation, both physical and mental. The physical includes I-lost-count-of-how-many-thugs he maims, tortures, or kills. Remember that Reacher's idea of the best way to enter a building is to knock with a bazooka and then waltz in through the smoking hole.
Problems get solved, bad guys get dead. Reacher ends up back on a bus.
Lee Child has a winning formula and he knows his audience. Reacher is a drifter/Robin Hood who always seems to find someone being wronged and he does whatever is necessary to fix things. And his way of fixing things usually involves hand-to-hand combat, excessive gun play, and the requisite high body count. I really did try to keep track of the dead, but eventually lost count. I'm guessing 40-50, but could be more.
It's really hard to go wrong with Child. After 25 consecutive hits (all of which have been optioned to Hollywood), it's hard to doubt him. And it makes for some good pre-Christmas reading as Reacher books are released annually in the fall. That makes Child and Reacher uniquely similar. Reliable, predictable, and successful. Reacher fans won't be disappointed.
East Coast Don
No comments:
Post a Comment