Two small towns in Colorado: Hope and Despair. Between them, nothing but twelve miles of empty road. Jack Reacher can't find a ride, so he walks. All he wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets are four redneck deputies who want to run him out of town. Mistake. They're picking on the wrong guy.
Competence porn with a somewhat preposterous setup
3 stars
Standard Jack Reacher. Teacher blows into town. Gets hassled and rather than move on, decides to mess with the people who hassled him
The preposterous part is the entire town of Despair Colorado is complicit. Even more preposterous is that no one talks. They just run Reacher right out of town for mysterious reasons. But if you can suspend disbelief on that, the rest falls into place.
How do you follow up from the perfection that was Bad Luck and Trouble? You take a dive -- Reacher works a mystery for no reason other than stubbornness. He completely outclasses the antagonists and takes them apart trivially in scene after scene.
The small town setting is a welcome change though... it feels a bit like a return to the origins of Reacher in Killing Floor, and there's something very nice about that.
It's fine. It's entertaining. But I prefer a challenge for Reacher and this isn't that. He's never threatened and his reasons are selfish. Maybe he's always been this way, but when his life isn't at stake, his actions are out of proportion and I don't like the character. This is quite possibly the worst Reacher novel so far... as it made me dislike Reacher.
Of the three mysteries that Reacher ultimately uncovers, two of them are …
How do you follow up from the perfection that was Bad Luck and Trouble? You take a dive -- Reacher works a mystery for no reason other than stubbornness. He completely outclasses the antagonists and takes them apart trivially in scene after scene.
The small town setting is a welcome change though... it feels a bit like a return to the origins of Reacher in Killing Floor, and there's something very nice about that.
It's fine. It's entertaining. But I prefer a challenge for Reacher and this isn't that. He's never threatened and his reasons are selfish. Maybe he's always been this way, but when his life isn't at stake, his actions are out of proportion and I don't like the character. This is quite possibly the worst Reacher novel so far... as it made me dislike Reacher.
Of the three mysteries that Reacher ultimately uncovers, two of them are barely criminal. The deserter subplot is oddly political and really feels out of place (10 years later), and the argument for Reacher acting different from his MP past actually occurs in story... and doesn't work. The uranium secret is legitimate business that Reacher has no right to uncover. And the Rapture cult is just silly -- the idea they built the dirty bomb without anyone noticing, especially with a military base watching them, strains credibility. It was necessary to explain why Reacher was doing what he was doing, and excuse his string of criminal acts (when he had no good reason!).
And ultimately that's the problem - Reacher is just a terrible person, basically a criminal, without any good reason. There's no threat to him. There's no obvious criminal activity. He's just annoyed that people wanted him out of town and... so he beats up two cops, four deputies, sets fire, breaks into a secure factory etc etc.
I enjoyed the writing, though less so than usual. However, it would have been nice if the characters or the author actually thought through cause and effect. Dear gods.
