Persuader

Persuader
by Lee Child
Recommended Ages: 15+

Some book reviews should come with a Spoiler Warning. For this review, I feel like issuing a Non-Spoiler Warning. I mean, I’m actually going to tell you less about what happens in this book than the back-cover blurb does. I’m also going to advise you not to read the back-cover or book-jacket blurb before you’ve made it a significant way through the book. I made the mistake of sneaking a peak at the back-cover blurb, and I found that it destroyed a surprise and discharged an electrical potential of tension that accumulated during the first chapter.

So, first chapter synopsis only: Jack Reacher is this guy who was in the military for a long time, and has been out of the military for a short time. He was much better at being in the military than he is at being out. But the skills he picked up during that earlier time prove really handy now, when – apparently by sheer chance – a rich college boy is snatched off a Boston street right in front of him in a barrage of weapons fire that puts said college boy’s body guards out of commission. Jack checks his “are you sure you want to do this” meter, then interferes with the kidnap with brutal efficiency. Unfortunately, one of the bodies that goes down belongs to a cop who just happened to be there.

Jack and college boy hit the road. Jack tells the boy he’ll take him anywhere he likes, as long as it’s out of town and doesn’t involve the police. Cop killers don’t get a warm welcome with the police, he reasons. College boy is all right with that; he’s so freaked out, having been kidnapped once before and having a mutilated ear to show for it. He begs and pleads and finally convinces Jack to drive him all the way to Maine, to the suspiciously well-armed oceanside fortress where his family lives. The kid's father is supposedly a rug importer, but there is clearly something else going on. More ominous still are the signs that someone else, someone unseen, is really in charge and that the kid’s parents, crooked dad and all, are just as trapped there as Jack soon will be. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Let’s not, for example, mention that there is more to why Jack is there than mere chance. Pay no attention to the insinuation that either a rescue mission or a piece of stone-cold revenge is in play, let alone both. Cover the next couple of sentences so you don’t find out, sooner than you should, that the book is a slow-burning fuse branching off to an exquisitely timed series of explosions. Jack Reacher frequently risks, and just as frequently inflicts, coldblooded death. He proves relentless, resourceful and ridiculously competent – and boy, does he know his way around a gun.

I am not a Tom Cruise fan, and I have not seen the film or films (I don’t even know whether there are more than one) featuring him as Jack Reacher. Basing my mental image of Jack Reacher on this book, I can’t begin to conceive of how Tom Cruise could play him. Please, don’t tell me. I would rather not know. Just as you would rather not know more than you strictly must to get hooked on this savagely violent, torturously suspenseful, unputdownable book.

Though this is the first book by Lee Child that I have read, it turns out to be the seventh in soon-to-be 24 novels in his Jack Reacher series, starting all the way back in 1997 with Killing Floor and due to continue in October 2019 with Blue Moon. In between, their titles include Die Trying, Tripwire, The Visitor, Echo Burning, Without Fail, The Enemy, One Shot, The Hard Way, Bad Luck and Trouble, Nothing to Lose, Gone Tomorrow, 61 Hours, Worth Dying For, The Affair, A Wanted Man, Never Go Back, Personal, Make Me, Night School, The Midnight Line and Past Tense, plus several novellas. Lee Child is a British transplant to New York, USA.