Romance for Real Women

Most real women are far too frugal to buy books in hard back. But there are some exceptions.

Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child are one exception. For those of you who don’t know, Jack Reacher is the itinerant ex-military cop who wanders the U.S., stumbling into situations requiring his special skills of calculation mixed with a hard headed willingness to do serious violence. He carries only essentials with him, a folded toothbrush, an ATM card and an expired passport. Every couple of days he buys a new set of clothes, discarding the old one. He occasionally works the odd job, but lives mostly on his savings.

Reacher’s operating principle is forward movement. He hates to go back. In Nothing to Lose, the new Reacher novel, he’s “taken it into his head to cross the continent diagonally” from Calais, Maine to San Diego, California. As the book opens, Reacher is in Hope, Colorado where he is intrigued enough by the name of the neighboring town, Despair, to make a side trip to it.

In Despair, he is picked up by the police, tagged a “vagrant” by the town judge and driven back to the border between Hope and Despair. His decision to stick around is described this way: “Six blocks to Main Street, Reacher figured. If he turns left, takes me onward to the west, maybe I’ll let it go. But if he turns right, takes me back east to Hope, maybe I won’t.”

Reacher has been called “One of the most popular characters in contemporary thrillers, a perfect hero” (Chicago Sun-Times) and “the thinking man’s action hero.” (Denver Post).

He is intriguing. And, he is “thinking” in the sense that he is calculating and not just when he is faced with violence where the odds are against him. Here, his operating principle is “Get your retaliation in first.” And there are other odd flashes of calculation as for example when he calls upon the judge in Despair. “In Reacher’s experience the average delay when knocking at a suburban door in the middle of the evening was about twenty seconds.”

What an extraordinary thing for a character to know!

But there is more. After a woman answers the door she “stood still and said nothing. In Reacher’s experience the husband would show up if the doorstep interview lasted any longer than thirty seconds.”

Wow.

But he is not a crusader in the sense that John MacDonald’s Travis McGee was a knight in tarnished armor defending the weak or wronged. Far from it. His only motivation to investigate Despair and trigger the events of the book is the right turn made by the cop. Once the town’s ugly secrets begin to emerge, he is on the “right” side, but only by happenstance.

I once read a review where Lee Child was quoted as saying “Reacher is an animal.” (That might not be exactly the word he used, but it’s close enough.)

He is. A fascinating and brilliant animal. And Lee Child has given us a fascinating and brilliant book.

It’s number one on my summer reading list.