with Andrew Child
I wish to correct all the places where I have said that Andrew Child is Lee’s son. Not so. They are brothers. I made a bad assumption that these family authoring franchises are all father-son, but not so! My bad!
The book opens with Reacher pinned on a metal table in a dark room. A man with two guns comes in to interrogate him, and in less than a page he has left that man disabled and unconscious!
So it doesn’t take long to realize that Reacher is still Reacher!
I seem to be in a rut of reading easy, non-demanding books. In that way, this book is very much like the Parker/Spenser book I just finished. It’s an easy comfort zone for me.
The setting
The coolest thing in the book so far for me is that it starts in the Ozarks at a funky backwoods motel!
Most of the early action happens at this motel – on the main highway through a particularly godforsaken part of the Ozark Mountains – which everybody, good guys and bad guys alike, calls the “weird motel“.
This is probably not a specific place, but it feels very familiar to me from the summers I spent with my dad knocking around the Ozarks in my early years (He died when I was 15.) If I didn’t actually spend some nights in a motel with a Sputnik theme, it seems like I did.
It’s a quiet, two-story well-maintained motel right on the highway. There’s a classic diner an easy walk right across the street. There a table by the window in the diner where you can see everyone who comes and goes from every door in every room. Very handy for the progress of the plot!
The diner, and particularly this table, is used by good guys and bad guys alike. Everyone goes there for breakfast in the morning (where else are you gonna go?). It’s open all night for the truckers. Rooms 3 and 7 are where the hookers live and work. It’s really quite a perfect setup!
The weird element is that the motel has a worn-out Sputnik theme. There’s a little Sputnik satellite on top of the flagpole, the walls of every room are space-themed. I have stayed in places just like this in my cross-country travels!
We are in the Ozarks, that big swath of mostly undeveloped backwoods area centered around the corner where Arkansas, Oklahoma and Missouri meet.
This area experienced a bit of a boom (probably a boomlet 🙂 in the late 50s and 60’s. I know that actually happened because I was there!
Personal Interlude:
Some fast-talkers latched into my dad in Springfield MO in the early 60’s(?). They saw a middle-aged bachelor medical doctor with more money than sense, so why not see if you can separate him from a little of that money for some shares on a uranium mine! 🙂 From my end, it was the occasion for some quality time with the father that I saw exactly once a year every summer.
But back to the book … In the story, there are at least three big, slightly out of date mansions scattered about this area. Between the Manson-family madness, dirty hippies, cost of living and crime, Southern California had lost some of it’s attraction for rich people.
Some developer had the (obviously terrible) idea that the low taxes and low crime in the Ozark Mountains would be the Next Big Thing for the rich to escape to. That did not work out, but these mansions are there to provide a plot device for our book.
So we have the mansions, the uranium mines, and the Sputnik-themed motel … this place was feeling pretty good about itself back in the 60’s!
The story
Why is Reacher here? He had hitched a ride with a guy who lost control on a winding, bad road (of which the Ozarks have many). The guy was killed, but Reacher wasn’t. The guy was part of this mysterious gang, who took Reacher prisoner. Was the guy FBI? Is one of the others FBI? Will Reacher ever remember what he was doing in the hours leading up to the crash?
So many qiestions!
The story picks up when a revenge-seeking disgraced Phoenix policewoman comes to Reacher’s bedroom door to kill him because she thinks she is the guy who killed her dad.
One of the bad guys is a massive human even bigger that Reacher(!), and he’s the kind guy who would’ve killed her day and not given it a second thought.
Reacher and the woman (“Knight”) are pretty good together. They almost get together on a few nights, but it never happens… for reason straight out of a sit com 🙂 Then one magic night they actually did get together and a good time was had by all.
To balance it all out, there is a good-looking woman villian also. The huge bad guy establishes his asshole bonafides as he is always trying to rub up against the lady bad girl and stupid childish things like that.
Finish up the first half
The story of the book got all tidied up with a bow on it around page 150 but that’s way too short of a book. Reacher and Knight storm the abandoned top-of-the-hill mansion that the bad guys have been using as headquarters. Atypically for Reacher, none of the evil-doers are killed. The giant guy, the smart guy, the hot woman, and one other guy are all politely handcuffed and left immobilized on the floor for the FBI to pick up.
The giant guy is called Kane, and Knight has a moment where she wants to just kill him outright as she had dreamed of, but decides that a long life in Federal prison would be better.
As I said, this would have been a perfectly good time to end the book, but it was not to be.
Reacher and Knight left before the FBI got there, and in some way I don’t remember any more, all the bad guys got out of their handcuffs and out of the building and out of the state. They escaped! There were an extra two cars of lowgrade thugs, friends of Kane who been hired for the next job, and somehow they bumbled in before the FBI got there, so now we have the whole second half of the book to look forward to!
The second half
The bad guys have taken their van full of gold bullion somewhere … we presume Florida. There’s nothing to keep Reacher and Knight in the Ozarks anymore, so goodbye Sputknik Motel and friendly diner, it’s off to St Louis to catch a plane.
FBI comes, and we get pretty funny Reacher take on their strange ways!
Now many pages later the book shifts, we’re at the part where Reacher is smarter than everyone else.
There are many pages of long paragraphs of dialog. Reacher always gets the good lines and is basically always right. 🙂
They all, good guys and bad guys both end up in the Bahamas. The last few pages are the Final Confrontation between Reacher and Kane. I skipped most of it, because you knew Reacher would be alive at the end, most of the bad guys would be dead, and all the larynx-crushing and leg-breaking in between wasn’t that interesting to me.
Reacher doesn’t finish Kane off because Knight has this fantasy of him standing trial. The FBI lady is not pleased and hints he will die on the operating table. Knight invites Reacher to stop by Phoenix, and everybody goes on their merry ways, and that’s it!
Epilogue
As luck would have it, on a Tuesday night when I’m 60 pages from finishing this book, the 2012 movie Reacher was on the tv. I only caught the last quarter or so, but thanks to Youtube TV I’ll soon catch the rest. It’s a fun movie, and not when I see Reacher in my head I see Alan Ritchson!