The best thing we discover here is the explanation for why Reacher left the Army. By the end of this adventure, he certainly...
Ever wonder why Jack Reacher left the Military Police and became a one-man freelance vigilante squad? Child goes back 14 years to show how it all happened.
His commanding officer, Col. Leon Garber, clearly doesn’t want to send Maj. Reacher to Carter Crossing, Miss., any more than Reacher wants to go. But Fort Kelham is a particularly bad place for a murder because Capt. Reed Riley, who commands Bravo Company there, is the son of Sen. Carlton Riley, the chair of the Armed Services Committee. And the rape and murder of Janice May Chapman in a nearby bar’s parking lot rings so many alarms that Garber needs someone to work undercover, basically spying on the local cops, as Maj. Duncan Munro heads the official investigation. No sooner has Reacher hitched into Carter Crossing than he makes several surprising discoveries. Janice May Chapman wasn’t killed in that parking lot. She was only the latest in a series of Carter Crossing murders. The first two victims, equally beautiful but African-American, poorer and less headline-worthy, have been forgotten by everyone but their families. Sheriff Elizabeth Deveraux orders Reacher out of town but then relents far enough to take him into her confidence and her bed. Reacher, who excels as both a lover and a fighter, has his early moments as a hard-nosed sleuth and a junkyard dog (after he taunts an aggrieved local family who’ve sent only three hulking guys to beat him up, he’s faced with six next time around). But the meteor shower of potential enemies coming at Reacher from every side—Sheriff Deveraux, Maj. Munro, Senate Liaison Col. John James Frazer, Sen. Riley and his son, a militia calling itself the Tennessee Free Citizens and that family of hulking yahoos—work against the action-driven inevitability of Child at his best (Worth Dying For, 2010, etc.). And he’s not as good as his competitors at devising the riddle-wrapped-in-a-mystery-inside-an-enigma structure he uses instead.
The best thing we discover here is the explanation for why Reacher left the Army. By the end of this adventure, he certainly has his reasons.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-34432-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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