Looking For a Good Book

Reacher!

It feels good to have another Reacher novel in hand. 

Jack Reacher can be a hard man to find when you want him but when you have the resources of the U.S. military intelligence at your disposal even finding Reacher is possible. Fortunately, General Susan Turner has that ability. 

Turner needs to have someone look into an incident – off the record – in which one of her IT reports was killed in Colorado. Officially declared a mugging gone wrong, Turner suspects there’s much more to it. And the fact that there is likely a breach in their internal communications suggests that it might be an inside job.

Reacher, along with Turner and her most trusted aide, slowly unravel a multi-billion dollar scheme involving cutting edge technology.  Being unable to ask for much help, not knowing who to trust, severely handicaps the trio in their efforts to avenge the slain soldier and secure the military’s communications once again.

What is there to say about this? It’s a Reacher novel. That means there’s lots of hard-hitting action, a little bit of sex, and an unapologetic settling of scores and taking of lives. Innocents are put into danger and Reacher will criss-cross the country to keep up with crooks.

Authors Lee Child and Andrew Child know how to write an action thriller and clearly have strong insight into what motivates Reacher. He doesn’t grow or change through the course of a book, which is good. We like him just as he is.

There’s a little bit of a mystery which keeps the plot moving and Jack Reacher isn’t all brawn – he’s smart, too, and he manages to pull all the pieces together.

It’s a quick read, page-turner. We like Reacher because he metes out justice the way we would like to see it when we know for a fact that the bad guys are truly evil. We know it’s wrong, but it’s also so, so right!

There are a couple of red herrings, which I enjoy, subtle as they are, but there are also characters introduced who simply provide fortuitous circumstances for Reacher. It does make me wonder if he’d manage to get his results if he didn’t have some darn good luck. It’s this quality of luck that stops me from giving this a straight 5 star rating (even though it rounds up to 5).

Looking for a good book? There are 31 books in the Jack Reacher series because the books, and the characters, are a lot of fun. Chain Reaction by Lee Child and Andrew Child holds true to the series and provides pure reading enjoyment.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

4-1/2 stars

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Chain Reaction

authors: Lee Child and Andrew Child

series: Jack Reacher #31

publisher: Bantam

hardcover, 416 pages