Having read every Lee Child book presently published, when I got the opportunity to review his latest, Personal, I turned to a book, How to Read Novels Like a Professor” by Thomas C. Foster. In it I found the ideal comment, to wit: “The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves that we would never see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again.” And Jack Reacher fills all of those premises and more. He is a tainted hero of the finest order; think of Shane, Dirty Harry, Yojimbo of Japan, Ned Kelly of Australia, Robin Hood of England and many more.
These kind of heros share certain characterisitics, some more than others. A solid belief in the individual, a tendency to live self-sufficiently, a definite distrust of society’s bureaucracies and certainly a firm moral code that doesn’t necessarily correlate with society’s but is based on the ideas of justice and fairness.
Jack Reacher certainly matches those traits and with a vengeance. He is a peripatetic wanderer, wears only one set of clothes and buys a new set every three or four days throwing the old set away and carries a fold-up toothbrush. He is big (more like a Schwartzenegger or The Rock than Tom Cruise) and fast. An ex Captain of the US Army Military Police he has tremendous investigative skills. One of the more delightful qualities of Lee Child’s character is his extensive knowledge of so many things all of which he brings to bear and explains them so very well, with the occasional nugget of information that might or might not be germane but you know is true in the real world no matter how esoteric. And best of all is his logical train of thought as he examines each situation and works out his responses.
In this, the newest of the Jack Reacher novels, Jack, in Washington state, finds an ad in the Army times telling him to call a friend. Within 30 minutes of his calling a car picks him up, takes him to McChord Air Force Base where he is whisked off to Pope Air force Base in North Carolina. There he meets an old friend and finds out that there are five elite snipers loose in the world one of whom, John Kott, has a deep grudge against Reacher. After all Kott has just completed a fifteen year prison sentence and is longing to get even. The first indication of this cabal of snipers is the rifle shot against the President of France. At a range of 1400 yards he was apparently saved by the protective glass around him.
The list of snipers is cut down as the suspects are found and their innocence proven. Eventually two remain and the search moves to England where the G8 Economic conference is to be held and it is apparent one if not more of those Ministers will be a target. To explain more would be to ruin one of Lee Child’s best thrillers except I will say that the title of the book fortells much of the end game.
