A Wanted Man

July 30, 2012
Bestseller Child’s surprise-filled 17th Jack Reacher novel (after 2011’s The Affair) takes the ex-military policeman on a wild road ride that builds to a terrific slam-bang climax. While hitchhiking one winter night in Nebraska with a broken nose that makes him look more than usually disreputable, Reacher is picked up by two men and a woman wearing identical cheap blue shirts. The fun begins when clues suggest that the men in the car are responsible for the brutal murder of another man at an abandoned pump station. The role of the woman in the car remains unclear. Sheriff Victor Goodman is quick to call the FBI, which arrives in the person of Julia Sorenson, only the first of many agencies and agents heard from. While the erratic trip through America’s heartland doesn’t always follow a logical path, Reacher displays his acuity, patience, endurance, and military skills in the exhilarating fashion series fans have come to expect. Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary.

August 15, 2012
Will Jack Reacher ever make it to that woman in Virginia he was trying to reach in Worth Dying For (2010)? Not if all hell continues to break loose in Nebraska. Shortly after an eyewitness sees three men enter a small concrete bunker outside an anonymous town and only two of them emerge, Reacher, "just a guy, hitching rides," is picked up by a trio of corporate-sales types: Alan King, Don McQueen and Karen Delfuenso. In a tour de force that runs well over a hundred pages, Child cuts back and forth between the clues county sheriff Victor Goodman and FBI agent Julia Sorenson gather concerning the unidentified man in the green coat who was stabbed to death inside that bunker and the inferences Reacher is making about his traveling companions. For one thing, it's clear that King and McQueen know each other better than either of them knows Delfuenso; for another, a good deal of what they casually tell him about themselves isn't true. Just when you've settled down expecting Child to keep up this rhythm indefinitely, he switches gears in an Iowa motel, and Reacher's left out of danger but on his own--at least until Sorenson arrives to arrest him and the two of them form a quicksilver partnership whose terms seem to change every time Sorenson gets another phone call from the cops or the Feds. After working every change imaginable on their relationship, Child switches gears again and sends them a bang-bang assault on a hush-hush installation that shows how far into America's heartland its enemies have penetrated. In this latest attempt to show Reacher enjoying every possible variety of conflict with his nation's government short of outright secession, Child (The Affair, 2011, etc.) has produced two-thirds of a masterpiece.

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April 1, 2012

Child's last five thrillers have been No. 1 New York Times best sellers, he's sold over a million ebooks, and One Shot will soon be a film starring Tom Cruise. Here, Jack Reacher returns, exactly six minutes after the end of Worth Dying For; what happens next should be thrilling.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2012
If a Lee Child novel begins with Jack Reacher standing by the side of a highway with his thumb out, you can be sure that the wrong guy is going to pick him up. You can also be sure that the novel will end with Reacher standing by the side of another highway, again with his thumb out. In between, all hell will break loose, with the mysterious Reacher, the man with no home, in the middle of it, subduing bad guys one bullet, or one head butt, at a time. In this seventeenth series installment, the wrong guys who pick Reacher up on a lonely Nebraska highway turn out to be two murderers and their female hostageor at least that's who we think they are, for a while. We think a lot of things for a whileabout terrorists, Homeland Security bumblers, warring FBI factions, and undercover agentsbut almost all our assumptions turn out to be false. Mostly, though, we don't have much time for thinking, since we're strapped into various Ford Crown Victoriasthe standard-issue automobile of local cops and the FBI alikecareening down midwestern interstates as Reacher, sometimes a captive, sometimes a pursuer, plots to save the endangered and smite those who do the endangering. There may not be as much actual violence in this novel as in other Reachers, but when it comes, it comes in thunder, and the tension leading up to it feels never-ending. Our mothers were surely right to warn us against hitchhiking, both because the wrong guys might pick us up and, especially, because we're not Jack Reacher, much as we'd like to be. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Jack Reacher prefers to come and go across the country anonymously, but that's not at all true of the novels in which he appears. The publication of every new Reacher is heralded through every possible form of mass communication. Boy, would Reacher hate that.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)