Jack Reacher, Lee Child's serial hero, savouring an espresso in a cafe in New York, sees a man drive a car away. When he goes back to the same cafe the next day, he is approached and questioned, and allows himself to be drawn into the affairs of a gang of mercenary warriors. The car had been loaded with a $1 million ransom and driven away by the kidnappers who had taken the mercenary chief's trophy wife. By the time it's over, after several sharp plot twists, he's in a gunfight and burying bodies with a backhoe.
Child is a skilled writer, without literary pretensions. His novels are all plot and pace, appealing to fans of suspense and action thrillers, military fiction and tough-guy detective fiction. Jack Reacher used to be an officer in the US Army Military Police, who lives on the road, with the clothes on his back, the money in his pocket, his strength, and his wits. He vaguely resembles John D. MacDonald's legendary Travis McGee, who lived on a houseboat, but Reacher is rootless.
He is more like a character from a spaghetti western, an ominous drifter who breaks the law, but honours a higher law. In real life, the detachment is usually found only in monks, and the violence in serial killers. A man with Reacher's code of honour can't exist outside of a social setting. A man who cares for others will have a different kind of life. This kind of novel appeals more to fantasies of power and freedom than to social values, although there is a chivalrous ethic at work.
It's a nicely crafted entertainment.
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