Krishna
For those of you who have been reading these reviews, it is not a surprise that Jack Reacher books by Lee Child feature often. For instance, the last two books reviewed were The Enemy and Persuader.
Like some of his other books, this story also starts with full action : an assassin, with a gun, driving a car into a parking lot. The hour is late and the place is deserted. He aims carefully, kills quite a few people at random and escapes in the mayhem. He was shooting from a far range and so was away even before the police could reach the scene.
The police were puzzled. They finally track down the attack site to the corner of the garage where we know the intruder indeed stood.
It seems too easy when they track the man behind it – he had left overwhelming evidence. They take down James Barr as he was sleeping. More evidence was found in his house. His sister Rosemary Barr works for a legal outfit and they send a lawyer to see James and get him to agree to plead guilty so that at least he will get life instead of a lethal injection. David Chapman, the lawyer meets Barr in prison but the guy would not offer any statement except ‘They got the wrong guy’. He demands to have Jack Reacher found and sent to him.
However, Barr makes a fatal mistake and pisses off a fellow prisoner who is the member of the gang. He gets beaten into a pulp and is in a coma in the hospital. The sister keeps insisting that the brother is innocent and manages to get a rookie lawyer (who is considered very good by Rosemary’s law firm) retained (for no money as she is very poor)
Reacher meanwhile sees the newsflash about James and decides to pay a visit to find out what is going on.
He first goes to the police chief James Rodin. He sends him to see his daughter Helen, who is the attorney that Rosemary Barr found. He meets the girl and Rosemary and announces that ‘He has not come to save James, but to bury him. He has done this before’. Yes, a shocker, but you wonder why then James wanted Jack Reacher found.
Helen Rodin persuades Reacher to hang around until he has had a chance to verify that his conviction about Barr is correct, and he reluctantly agrees.
There is an obligatory (for Lee Child) a bar room brawl involving Reacher and a few unruly thugs – the fight not of Reacher’s making of course – where four big baddies want to take on Reacher all at once – with (for us regular readers) predictable results.
He then realizes that it was a setup and wonders why. The police already had an open and shut case. That gets him thinking about James Barr and he suddenly realizes that he has been looking at the whole thing from a wrong angle. Barr was deliberately leaving evidence all along and has been doing illogical things as well. He then deduces that James was under pressure to do it, and further realizes that the only pressure he would be under if his sister was threatened. He decides to get to the bottom of things.
Now, he locates the girl who set him up in an auto parts store. Gets the name of the ring leader from her and goes to see him, only to find that he has run away.
He goes to meet James at the hospital with Helen and realizes that James really has a concussion; not only does he not remember what he had done but is totally bewildered when told what he had done.
Meanwhile, Zee, the kingpin who coerced James and tried to frighten Reacher away with the pub scene, decides to frame Reacher by killing the same girl and putting her corpe outside Reacher’s hotel, not realizing that the previous night Reacher had moved to another hotel as is his habit.
Reacher now realizes that they are trying to get him arrested or out of the city and decides to stay put. He spends nights hidden (once sleeping with his ex girlfriend Hutton) and tricking his followers. There is a great scene where he simply disappears from the view of the pursuer who was convinced that he was very discrete.
That pursuer was Raskin. He follows Raskin and finds out his three associates. Charlie, a giant of a man Vladimir. And another guy called Sokholov. When they divide and flee, Reacher hits him unconscious, takes his cell phone and calls Emerson. The chief of police, Emerson is frustrated at not being able to find Reacher but he gives Emerson the names of all associates and the number plates of the two cars he saw.
The Zee realizes that Rankin is a liability. He makes Rankin dig a grave for himself, stand in front of it and kill himself so that his, Rankin’s, corpse will fall into the grave.
Reacher spends a night with his old flame who was subpoenaed and who stonewalled the investigation, giving nothing away about either James Barr or about Reacher.
He then gets the newscaster Yani in her car (threatening her with a fake gun) and then comes fully clean about the crime so far. He fully explains to her his suspicions and says that she has the story of a lifetime that can get her a Pulitzer. She believes him finally and then lends him her car.
He travels to the shooting range where the owner, Cash, was a fellow army man. He recognizes Reacher from a trial shooting he asked Reacher to do and is full of awe. He shows what a perfect shooter James Barr was and Charlie, who was with him, was an awful shot.
In a brilliant twist, Reacher pieces all of this together. He realizes that the shooting results which Cash gave him and which he truly believed, were faked and that it is Charlie who is an excellent shot. (‘There is nothing truly random’ goes his preamble in explaining why. Brilliant). He also realizes that the shooting was really done by Charlie in James Barr’s clothes and the evidence was stacked against Barr. But why? He realizes that this was meant to look like mass shooting to throw people off when it was really meant to kill one specific woman
He convinces Yanni to employ a lead investigator Franklin and when Reacher explains his motive, they find the missing clue – the third victim was Olin Archer and her husband, Ted, was missing. They found that he lost the contract of the City to another company and the other company has no information on record because it was set up as a trust corporation with only an attorney as representative.
They visit the man and Reacher ‘persuades’ him to give the names of the owners. They are Vladimir, Sokholov, and others they already know and the mastermind called the Zee. Not Zee, but ‘the Zee’.
Reacher is arrested for the murder of the girl, but in a stunning move, he gets himself released by having Yanni confess that she was with him in his hotel room (the new one that they did not know about) the whole night. The police are forced to release him.
Knowing that Helen, Yanni and Reacher are getting too close for comfort, the Zee abducts Rosemary Barr and tries to ‘convince’ her to give evidence that James, her brother, had planned the murder.
Then follows the breathtaking climax where Reacher, Yanni, Helen, Cash go to the lion’s den – heavily guarded with heat sensing cameras, armed to the teeth, they wait for Reacher who they know is coming for them. A brilliant series of events where Lee Child proves why he is the master of the action thriller genre. Truly a delight to read.
The final twist is the exposure by Reacher of the mole at the highest levels of the police hierarchy – was it Alex Rodin or Emerson? Or someone like Bianca?
Very satisfying read. Not perhaps as complex as some other books of Reacher but full of fun to read.
8/10
= = Krishna