"Bad Luck and Trouble"
(reviewed by Eleanor Bukowsky JUN 4, 2006)
“The unit had organized itself like a small-market baseball team enjoying an unlikely pennant run: talented journeymen working together, no stars, no egos, mutually supportive, and above all ruthlessly and relentlessly effective.”
There are many reasons to admire Jack Reacher, the taciturn hero of Lee Child’s Bad Luck and Trouble. He is a low-maintenance individual who travels with just his passport, ATM card, and a toothbrush. Reacher, who is incredibly strong and an expert in weaponry and hand-to-hand combat, will go out of his way to protect the few people he likes and respects. He is also intelligent, intuitive, and creative; by thinking out of the box, he usually finds the answers to whatever questions are puzzling him.
In Bad Luck and Trouble, Reacher has a reunion of sorts with three of his buddies from the army: Frances Neagley, Karla Dixon, and David O’Donnell. They reunite because of a tragic event: Calvin Franz, who worked with them years ago in the military police, was thrown out of a helicopter in the California desert after suffering unspeakable torture. The victim left behind a wife and little boy. Three other MPs from the same special investigations unit, Jorge Sanchez, Tony Swan, and Manuel Orozco, have disappeared, as well. Reacher and his remaining ex-colleagues band together to find out what happened to these men and why. He is also plotting revenge: “There are dead men walking, as of right now. You don’t throw my friends out of helicopters and live to tell the tale.” The slogan that Reacher and the others live by is: You do not mess with the special investigators.”
Lee Child’s Reacher is a modern day cowboy, who generally travels alone from town to town, minding his own business. Yet, somehow, “bad luck and trouble” always manage to find him. This time, in a refreshing variation on Child’s usual formula, Reacher takes his place as the commanding officer of a tightly knit and focused team, each member making his or her own invaluable contribution to the investigation. Neagley is smart and tough, and she has plenty of money to bankroll their operation. Dixon is a forensic accountant with a sharp mathematical mind, equal to Reacher’s. O’Donnell is fast, powerful, and fearless. This formidable foursome is pitted against a group of ruthless adversaries who always seem to be one step ahead of them.
Lee Child has created a cadre of well-drawn heroes, and the fast-paced action never flags. The terse, often dryly humorous dialogue is enormously entertaining. In addition, some nifty mental puzzles are thrown in to challenge the investigators’ powers of deduction; brawn without brains just doesn’t cut it in today’s world. On the downside, the villains are one-dimensional and the finale is a bit too pat to be believed, even in a fantasy such as this. Still, Bad Luck and Trouble is great escapist fun, and it will undoubtedly appeal to a wide and enthusiastic audience.
- Amazon readers rating:
from 12 reviews
Read a chapter excerpt from Bad Luck and Trouble at Lee Child's official website
(back to top)"The Hard Way"
(reviewed by Eleanor Bukowsky JUN 4, 2006)
“He was calm. Just another night of business as usual in his long and spectacularly violent life. He was used to it, literally. And the remorse gene was missing from his DNA. Entirely. It just wasn’t there. Where some men might have retrospectively agonized over justification, he spent his energy figuring out where best to hide the bodies.”
At the beginning of Lee Child’s The Hard Way, Jack Reacher is sitting in a New York café sipping a double espresso and minding his own business. However, as always, trouble finds Reacher. Soon, Jack is deeply involved in the hunt for whoever kidnapped a beautiful woman named Kate Lane and her eight-year-old daughter, Jade. Kate’s husband, Edward Lane, assisted by his cadre of loyal ex-military employees, is desperate to find whoever took Lane’s wife and stepdaughter and he is willing to pay Reacher a hefty sum for his services.
Using his considerable savvy as a former army investigator, Reacher begins to look into the case, but he soon gets the feeling that there are key facts that he is missing. Helping him to uncover the truth are Patti Joseph, the sister of Edward Lane’s first wife, Anne (who was also kidnapped), and Lauren Pauling, a retired FBI special agent turned private investigator. As time passes, Reacher begins to realize that he has become involved in a complex and ugly situation made much worse by secrets, lies, and a nasty cover-up.
Reacher must make full use of his sharp powers of observation and analysis to pick up subtle clues that others miss. His brain proves to be a more potent weapon than his considerable brawn, and most readers will root for this strong man who resorts to violence only as a last resort. Adding to the book’s power is a riveting scene in which Reacher interviews a crippled man who survived unspeakable torture and was left severely maimed. Even an individual as hardened as Reacher cannot help but feel compassion for someone who is in so much pain.
The book’s one-dimensional villain is a stereotypical psychopath, which makes him an uninteresting, albeit formidable foe. In addition, although I have been a big fan of Reacher for years, Child doesn’t humanize him here as much as he has in the past, and more than once, our hero comes across as a bit too terse and robotic. The bloody ending has Child casting Reacher in the familiar role of the lonely cowboy pitted against a band of evil desperadoes. The Hard Way offers escapist entertainment, a few surprising twists, and a dollop of romance, but it lacks the freshness and excitement of Child’s best work.
- Amazon readers rating:
from 125 reviews
Read a chapter excerpt from The Hard Way at Lee Child's official website
(back to top)"The Enemy"
(reviewed by Mary Whipple JUN 01, 2004)
"This case was like a wave on the beach…like a big old roller that washes in and races up the sand, and pauses, and then washes back out and recedes, leaving nothing behind….Except it did leave something behind…It left a big ugly piece of flotsam stuck right there on the waterline, and [someone had] to address it."
With a taut, staccato style sometimes reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald, Lee Child gives us his eighth Jack Reacher novel, a police procedural with a difference: Reacher is an MP, an army Major at Fort Bird, obedient to a different set of rules and objectives from what one finds in the typical police investigation. Instead of having interdepartmental rivalries and arguments about "turf" and jurisdiction to complicate the solution of crimes, Reacher must deal with larger issues of army chains of command, rivalries between divisions, ambitious generals, and issues of national policy and national security in his investigations.
It is early in the new year of 1990, as this prequel to the series opens, and Reacher has been suddenly transferred to Fort Bird, North Carolina, from his duties in Panama. Instead of keeping an eye on the legal aspects of the search and apprehension of Manuel Noriega, he is now "MP XO," the Executive Officer of the Military Police, dealing with the day-to-day problems of a mid-sized army post. He does not think he has done anything wrong and does not think he has been demoted, but he is concerned because his responsibilities have been drastically cut back and he does not have much to do. Until, that is, a two-star general, newly arrived from Germany, dies of a heart attack in a seedy, nearby motel, presumably with a prostitute. His briefcase, containing the agenda for a top-secret conference in California, has disappeared, and when Reacher and his aide, Lt. Summer, drive to Virginia to break the news to the general's wife, they find her dead, too, bludgeoned to death with a crowbar within hours of the general's death from "natural causes."
With almost military precision, dramatic complications begin to unfold, and Reacher soon finds himself dealing with a brand new commanding officer, to whom he takes an instant dislike, and two more deaths, one of which is a gruesome butchering which takes place on the base, and the other of which involves the highly regarded commanding officer of Special Forces for Fort Bird, found dead in a drug-ridden alleyway in Columbia, South Carolina. Ordered by superiors to cover up murder by calling it a "training accident," Reacher and Summer investigate surreptitiously, wondering how and why the dead general and his two aides, a one-star general and a colonel, all from an Armored division in Germany, have come to Fort Bird at all, when they had only a short layover in Washington, D.C., before flying to California for the mysterious conference. Further intrigue develops when Reacher also discovers that his MP XO counterparts at twenty more bases throughout the world have also been newly appointed to their positions, all of them on or around December 29. Obvious questions arise about who is pulling the strings, who has the power to transfer so many MPs to new posts, and why someone would want to do so.
Child is a meticulous writer who pays great attention to details and to the unfolding of events in strict chronological order. No reader will become confused by flashbacks as the background and details are filled in, and the plot moves at a breath-taking pace, with one dramatic scene following hard on the heels of another. Reacher and Summer are not fully developed characters, but they do not need to be in order to keep the reader's attention as they investigate the complex interactions and relationships which keep the story moving on several levels simultaneously. As Reacher moves from Fort Bird to Paris, where his mother is dying, and on to Germany, the scope of the investigation widens, eventually involving the highest levels of the army and providing glimpses of how influential individuals can use the system for their own advancement.
As specific individuals come under suspicion, Reacher is determined to learn who is controlling the grisly chess game which has resulted in four gruesome deaths, why murder is the only option, and how the murder victims fit into the big picture. All these questions are answered in a grand finale of the most extravagant sort, with twists and turns galore and many surprises. But though the ending successfully brings together all the disparate threads in a most spectacular way, which would be a blockbuster ending to a film, it may also be a disappointment to some readers. The premise behind the plot and the motivation which led to the murders, when finally revealed, seemed unrealistic to me, too cynical to justify the manipulation which underlies the entire novel and the murderous extremes to which "the enemy" goes. Though Child is brilliant in creating an impulsive but likeable main character, an exciting story packed with action, and an up-close and personal view of the army and its generals, the ending left me cold, feeling a bit betrayed by the grim view of humanity depicted in the final pages.
- Amazon readers rating: from 79 reviews
Read a chapter excerpt from The Enemy at Lee Child's official website
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Bibliography: (with links to Amazon.com)
Jack Reacher series:
- Killing Floor (1997)
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- Die Trying (1998)
- Tripwire (1999)
- Running Blind (2000)
- Echo Burning (2001)
- Without Fail (2002)
- Persuader (2003)
- The Enemy (May 2004)
- One Shot (June 2005)
- The Hard Way (May 2006)
- Bad Luck and Trouble (May 2007)
- Nothing to Lose (June 2008)
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Book Marks:
- The official website for Lee Child
- Reacher Creatures fan site
- Thrilling Detective on the Jack Reacher series
- BookLoons review of Echo Burning
- Bookloons review of Without Fail
- The Mystery Reader review of Without Fail
- The Mystery Reader review of Persuader
- ShotsMag review of The Enemy
- New York Times review of The Hard Way
- ShakingThrought.Net review of The Hard Way
- Mystery Ink review of Bad Luck and Trouble
- The New York Times review of Bad Luck and Trouble
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About the Author:
Lee Child is a native of England and former television writer. His debut, Killing Floor, won both the Anthony and the Barry Awards for Best First Mystery. Foreign rights in the Jack Reacher series have sold in thirty-nine territories.
He lives outside New York City, where, lucky for us, he is at work on his next Jack Reacher thriller.
