Child has turned away from formulaic high-jinks to explore his characters instead: The result? His best so far.
The eighth Jack Reacher tale (Persuader, 2003, etc.) is a fabulously suspenseful prequel that reveals Reacher’s character as he uncovers a homicidal cabal of military officers.
On New Year’s Eve 1990, Military Police Major Jack Reacher gets a call: a general is dead, evidently of a heart attack while having sex in a seedy motel near an isolated North Carolina Army base. The general and three subordinates had just arrived in the US from Germany and were en route to Fort Irwin, California. Why did the general take a 289-mile detour for a sleazy fling? Reacher crosses the road to a strip joint where he searches for the prostitute whose favors brought on the heart attack. After noticing other soldiers in the club, Reacher avenges a battered prostitute by beating up the joint’s owner. Back at the base, Reacher gets another call: the general’s wife has been bludgeoned to death during an apparent burglary of their Virginia home. Reacher teams up with Lieutenant Summer, an attractive, coolly competent black female MP, but finds few clues at the scene. Soon after, the hideously mutilated body of a Special Forces soldier whom Reacher saw at the strip joint is found. Not only had this soldier signed a complaint against Reacher about the fight at the club, but also his fatal injuries could have been inflicted only by a man of Reacher’s strength and height. The Special Forces think Reacher killed him and have marked him for death. Then, suspense at its peak, Child takes Reacher and his brother Joe to Paris to visit their dying mother. Child merely touches on the mother-son relationship that has had so much to do with the rootless, brooding action hero Reacher has become. Then it’s back to the action: another corpse, and uneasy undercurrents in Army bureaucracy that tell Reacher the post-USSR peace dividend will be anything but.
Child has turned away from formulaic high-jinks to explore his characters instead: The result? His best so far.Pub Date: May 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-33667-5
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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