Krishna
Since we discovered Jack Reacher story a while ago, we have reviewed many of his books. See 61 Hours or Gone Tomorrow for two examples. Let us look into this story now.
Elridge Tyler is driving his daughter back after buying her shoes when his phone rings and a voice asks him to scare a lone wanderer away. The said wanderer is nosing around where he is not needed but may be an ex military cop, but with no known connections. That, of course, is Jack Reacher. He meets a drunk doctor in a bar in the city he is currently in. The doctor rejects a call from a battered wife. Reacher takes the doctor to a visit by the woman and then goes in search of her abusive husband. Reacher tracks him eating steak with a bunch of thugs. And a very typical Reacher scene follows. He takes one man who was trying to force him out – waits until they are alone – and disables him. Goes back, breaks the nose of the husband, and walks away. The husband, Seth Duncan, is part of a large and influential family that everyone fears. The ‘stranger’ has now made a powerful enemy. Now Seth seems to have delayed the payment for an important client and that person had come over to teach Seth a lesson and battered his wife. Reacher is told by the doctor’s wife who came to visit him that ‘he should run and is in terrible danger’. Before she finished the conversation, four men come in a truck and wreck the doctor’s Subaru. To protect the lady, Reacher steps out, takes out all of them (who had carried heavy metal items for the attack) and delivers them in a heap in front of Duncan’s house. The restaurant owner tells how Duncans hold the whole city in fear and submission. Reacher then is asked to leave and he hides the truck and manages to get a room for the night by just going into his room and sleeping. When the cleaner gets there, he persuades her to give him breakfast. Meanwhile the Duncans plot to get the mafia man in the South, much more powerful to think Reacher is the reason he has product difficulties with Duncan. . And that man is being harassed by an ever bigger fish, all due to the goods not arriving on time. This book is different from others in many ways. There are chains in the link. When they all realize that they cannot live without the product of Duncans, they then decide to send two men each to this rustic place. Now there are six people looking for Reacher, and in addition, they internally agree that the will eliminate the others in the chain so that they can deal directly and share the extra profits. Reacher says to the doctor that he will go to the police station and look at the records for girl’s disappearance. If no evidence of malfeasance is found, he will go on to Virginia as per his original plan. When he goes to park the car in a hotel, and meets the manager, he gets no further information. As he is coming back to the park he meets a Lebanese man who acts suspiciously and reacts with no thinking. A well placed kick kills him (heart rate issues) with no outward sign. He leaves the man in the car and finds and takes that man’s car with him. In the meanwhile, his partner does not find his partner and reports to the man high up on the chain, Mahmeini, that his partner had run away. Mahmeini cannot believe it but asks him to get the others in a rush to a secluded spot pretending he had sent the man away for a pinzer movement. To save face. He is asked to find a replacement car for the one lost, and the only car he can find, though he does not know it, is Duncan’s car with his partner in the trunk!He then leaves then and goes away ‘to do important work’. Out of the four guys there, Safir’s guys convince Duncan’s men that they should work together till they have taken care of the other two. They agree but Duncan’s guys kill the others and set fire to the car. Now they go after Duncan – the Duncan family house. Coincidentally, the remaining Mahmeini’s man reaches the same spot (earlier, parked in the dark) and accidentally discovers his own partner dead in the trunk. He assumes it is Duncan’s doing because the ownership paper on the car is in the name of Seth Duncan. Multiple misunderstandings and similar thought process among multiple thugs – a slight vein of farce running through. Reacher is at the doctor’s house but when a car comes he assumes it is Duncan’s wife and comes out unarmed. He finds it is Seth Duncan. With a shotgun. When Reacher is planning his escape, his hired guns arrive. Seth dislocates Reacher’s nose and renders him unconscious. When he comes to, he is in the basement – unarmed, with the doors locked. Seth leaves, with his armed thug on guard and convinces the doctor and his wife, as well as the mother of the missing girl to back his story to live. He plans to eliminate Reacher and get rid of the body. Meanwhile the man from Mahmeini meets the Duncans and says that from now on they will deal directly with Duncans cutting out the middlemen. There are intrigues and misunderstandings. Even Reacher guesses wrong but then he does not have information that we, the readers, have. Even so, for one used to Reacher coming to almost always correct information based on pure logic – whether this is realistic or not – it comes as a mild surprise. The intrigues keep coming. While Jack is locked in, helpless, he plots his comeback against almost impossible odds. Outthinking the two strong thugs who are not as smart, he gets rid of them both and goes after the Duncans. He has the doctor, the doctor’s wife and the mother of the missing child Coe in support. With them he hatches a brilliant plan to get rid of them all. It is pure adrenaline, Reacher style. Fabulous to read, and reminds you of his earlier works where action explodes on every page. Then towards the end, he goes to the likely location of the missing girl, and that is when we realize that the prologue started at the very place, almost at the end of the book. He then realizes how Duncans were making their money and Seth Duncan’s wife tells him a bit of the rest in terms of how Seth himself came to live with the rest of the Duncans. A brilliant story, well done. Sure, you can pick holes in it easily, like the police ‘kind of drafting in Reacher indirectly’ to help with the revenge or how he figures out that there is a fifth person waiting for him (Eldridge) and why he thinks that person is alone but it is like asking questions like ‘How can one James Bond do all that?’ Wrong book to poke holes in the story, in my opinion. Just suspend your disbelief and go for the enjoyable ride with Jack Reacher. It is loads of fun.
9/10
– Krishna