And we’re always rooting for him.Īs I was writing this review, I went to Child’s web site to check on something. There are bad guys out there, and when Reacher confronts them it’s them or him. But somehow the violence never seems gratuitous. There’s always a lot of blood and killing. In my opinion he writes the most realistic dialogue in any of today’s crime novels.Ĭhild’s books are not for the squeamish. If all this sounds unbelievably entangled, Child makes you believe it. A phone call that Reacher makes gives him information that connects him to the killer who appears to be connected to the college student’s father. At that time Reacher thought he had killed the man responsible for the sergeant’s death, but now he sees the man on a Boston street. The book goes back and forth between this present-day situation and one a decade earlier when Reacher unwittingly sent his sergeant to her death. But getting in turns out to be the easy part.

The father is a suspected drug dealer who is believed to have abducted a federal agent. During the attempt Reacher “shoots and kills” a campus cop so that he can “rescue” the young man and thus get into his father’s house. First–“The cop climbed out of the car exactly four minutes before he got shot.” Last–“The message said, I’m in.” Between those two sentences is a set-up in which Reacher and DEA agents foil the staged kidnapping attempt of a college student. The novel has one of the greatest opening chapters I’ve ever read, with first and last sentences that make sure you won’t put the book down. Now he criss-crosses the country with, if I remember correctly, his wallet, passport, and toothbrush, nothing more. The army was getting smaller and he had risen as far as he was going to, so he left. Reacher had gotten to the rank of major before he was rifed (let go, downsized, or, as the Brits say, made redundant). Persuader is the twelfth novel in the Reacher series, and like all the others it’s masterful. Ten years later, that’s still his answer when he’s asked that question, although the sergeant was killed the day after she asked it. The question was asked by a young sergeant just posted to his staff.

It was Jack Reacher’s answer to a question posed to him ten years ago, when he was still an Army MP. That’s the quote three pages from the end of Persuader by Lee Child.