Suspense

I came across this novel while browsing through latest thrillers in a bookstore while on a vacation. I like Jack Reacher, his approach to things and relentless urge to do right thing even if that puts him into the pretty bad spot.

This story starts with Reacher being on a little bit downside. He is contemplating his actions after woman - he was obviously very much into - leaves him because she is not into long term relations (which is funny because Reacher is also rather single-night-affair-only person too). Story between Reacher and the woman seems to be linked to some of the previous novels I am not familiar with, will need to track that one down. So Reacher is feeling downbeat and suddenly comes across something that takes him by complete surprise - a ring that he knows how hard it is to gain.... and he finds it in a pawn shop.

So for no other reason than to force himself to do something meaningful (instead of thinking about the girl that left him) Reacher starts the search for the ring owner because he recons owner must be in some serious issues if ring got pawned. And considering the ring owner and Reacher most definitely share a lot, he feels like he is helping an old estranged friend.

And so story begins.

I liked it, a lot. Not for a story alone but because we see Reacher in a different light even for a relatively short time during his quest. He is no longer just wagabond walking across the country for no specific reason. He is a man who tasted something that he liked but that he lost and he cannot figure out why (although he understands the reasoning). Being a person who never backed off from anything he understands that life goes on and that he cannot change much. But he needs to vent frustration so badly he embarks on a quest of helping unknown person.

And when he vents his frustration that means bad guys gonna fly around like they were kicked by a mule.

That is why I like the character so much - he is paladin-like character. He wanders the world trying to avoid conflict and just observe the people. But as it happens bad things are something he encounters all the time and when that happens he jumps readily in to right things up.

One of the reviewers said Reacher acts like an old man in this novel. I have to agree, he acts with certain level of seriousness that shows his age and life experience. I could not but see him as Clint Eastwood-like character coming across bad guys and teasing them to make his day.

Highly recommended for all thriller fans. ( )

Pretty interesting edition of Reacher ( )

I'm really disappointed by THE MIDNIGHT LINE by Lee Child. Perhaps the author spoiled me all these years with his Reacher stories, but the books of late do not compare to his earlier works. In fact, this one just dragged on and on. Action in the story was minimal and it is probable that somebody other than Lee Child wrote this story. I haven't joined others on the bandwagon yet to no longer read this author's books. I know that the last couple have disappointed me - and I've read them all to date. I'll give him one more chance. If you are a follower from the beginning, you might want to pass this one up. ( )

Tom Cruise plays Jack Reacher in the movies, but, for the record, Reacher is big enough to fit at least two Tom Cruises inside his skin, if his musculo-skeletal frame ever up and abandons his outer covering. Lee Child’s hero, the ex-military police major, has now had nearly two dozen adventures, mostly crisscrossing America. He is a completely free man who works now and again, collects his pension and moves on. In every novel, however, he gets drawn into some local or regional drama. He almost always saves the day by a heady combination of brawn and wit. (His antecedent is Hercules.)

The Reacher novels are sometimes very good and sometimes so-so. There are spots in “Midnight Line” where I found the dialogue stilted, but Reacher novels are more about plot and the thrill of seeing how Reacher gets out of each mess. There are also a few good lines, as there usually are.

Previous novels mentioned Reacher's phobia of laundromats, so I was amused when, in this novel, Reacher makes the owner of a laundromat his nemesis. Of course, Arthur Scorpio is not really making his fortune from laundry; indeed, his laundromat does not seem to have many customers. It is what is going on in Scorpio’s backroom office that brings him and Reacher into conflict.

Reacher is about to get back on a bus when he spies, in a pawn shop window, a West Point class ring, engraved inside with “S.R.S. 2005.” (Child often drops interesting factoids such as, in this case, that each U.S. Military Academy graduate designs his or her own class ring or can opt not to get one at all.) Having graduated from West Point himself (and opted not to get a ring), Reacher decides to find out the story behind this ring. Soon he finds himself being warned off by criminals and cowboys as he follows a trail from the Midwest to the West. (Another interesting factoid: Wyoming, where much of the action takes place, is larger than many countries; at one point, Reacher is traveling from deep in Wyoming to South Dakota and Child notes that even though he has already covered the equivalent of the distance between New York and Boston, he has yet to leave Wyoming.)

As always, Reacher becomes involved in the problems of the people he meets. If he likes them and tries to help them, the reader is told a good deal about the universality of people’s problems. S.R.S. turns out to have a set of related but separate problems that address the theme of the power and fragility of beauty as well as severe chronic pain and the pyrrhic victory of pain medication.

As always, too, Reacher’s behavior raises moral qualms. In the very first Reacher novel, he murders two men who are following him. It seems unjustified. Then Reacher opens the trunk of their car and finds the body of a man they had tortured to death. Suddenly, Reacher’s killing seems a bit less egregious. Didn’t the men deserve death? Perhaps, but Reacher did not know about the body beforehand, and in a civil society it was not his right to execute the men.

Reacher gets away with murder again here. Or he gets away with not reporting murder. (Near the very end he may or may not commit a murder; we don’t find out.) In any case, to Reacher, justice seems to be served when people get what they deserve, whether Reacher is the agent of that retribution or not.

Child’s hero is an anti-hero in a broader sense. He is the personification of anomie and Nietzschean moral relativism. He may not be able to articulate what constitutes moral equilibrium in the universe, but he knows it when he feels it; and when he senses that he has seen justice to the end, he moves on, leaving law enforcement to pick up the pieces. Often, Reacher either persuades the authorities to accept his definition of justice, or else they already have a feeling for non-judicial justice themselves. In this novel, Agent Noble is in the first category and Detective Nakamura seems to be in the second. Mr. Bramall, a private investigator, and General Simpson seem to fall in between, but since Bramall ends up helping Reacher bend the law to the point of fatiguing it, it is doubtful he would ever come forward having compromised his own ethics for the sake of a client.

Child is not worried about bending the law or ethics. Reacher has admirable qualities, but his amoral take is amusing without deserving to be taken really seriously. (I understand that Reacher novels sell well in France where, if people are not especially amoral, there is a tradition of admiring amoral anti-heroes in fiction.)

Stylistically, Child’s storytelling is instructively minimalist and seems surprisingly well-plotted for a writer who is celebrated for his improvisation. (Child claims he does not know where he is going when he begins writing a novel.) Sentences often consist of incomplete staccato strings of words that only make sense when added to other incomplete strings. On display in many Reacher novels is a tin ear for American dialogue (Child is British), but this seems less glaringly in evidence this time around, although once here Child refers to a police detective as a member of CID, which, I believe, is more of a British designation than a U.S. one. (Child does not even tell us here that it stands for Criminal Investigation Division.) I have read at least half a dozen of the Reacher novels but don’t at all feel compelled to read all of them. ( )