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Okay, you all know I’m a big fan of the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. I have read 9 of the 15 currently out (with The Affair to come in September, yay!). So please take me seriously when I say this is the best one I’ve read yet!

As has become my habit, I listened to this one as an audiobook in the car. I love the narrator, Dick Hill. I think he has just the right mix of slow, serious cadence (imbuing Reacher’s words with the gravity they deserve), and a lightheartedness in the right moments.

And like all the Reacher novels, this novel is fast-paced, suspenseful – I mean real edge-of-the-set, sitting-in-the-driveway-biting-my-nails-while-Husband-wonders-what-I’m-up-to suspense – and action-packed. Reacher is his usual superhero self. Mysterious characters approach him as he tries to mind his own business, and (with limited reluctance) he enters their world, to try and save a kidnapped woman and child. But wait! Are the bad guys really who we think they are? There is intrigue, including military and international intrigue. There are beautiful, sexy, strong, independent women; some of them are also traumatized. There are loyal sisters. Reacher is cool, funny, comforting, and simultaneously rock-hard strong and smart, and brutally violent. (Only when it’s appropriate, of course.)

In The Hard Way, Reacher is recruited by a team of mercenary ex-special forces soldiers to assist in solving the kidnapping of the boss’s wife & step-daughter. As things unfold, he discovers that he hasn’t been told everything – like the fate of the boss’s first wife, kidnapped five years prior, and the fate of two former employees. His loyalties shift; he’s not sure who he can trust. He meets a former FBI-agent, who was involved in the earlier kidnapping case, who may turn out to be a partner of sorts.

I think part of what made this one extra-special to me was the extremity of the danger and trauma at stake, and the happy ending that our sympathetic characters are teased with, the happiness they MIGHT achieve if Reacher is successful. There are some gruesome images offered up; this is not for the faint-at-heart. But if you love a lone ranger with iron-clad morals, a heart of gold, and a Rambo-style ability to inflict pain on those who deserve it, in a world of beautiful/handsome good guys and really bad bad guys, Reacher may be for you. In fact, it’s rather like the traditional Western novel in that lone-ranger sensibility. But these have an intelligence lacking in the traditional Western (not trying to call them stupid; bear with me). Reacher thinks things through in a split second, and we get to share his thoughts on bullet trajectories, angles, percentages, and the weighing of one possible outcome against another. It’s very cerebral at the same time that it’s very physical. I love it.

Before this novel, I didn’t think I’d have favorites within the series. They’re all pretty great. But I’d put this one up there, and if you’re curious, I’d also pick out Echo Burning as a favorite. It was my first Reacher novel, and I picked it up because of the setting: far West-Texas desert on the Mexican border, which is an area where I have spent some very good times. That got me in the door, and opened up the whole series for me, and I’m SO grateful. It had another extra-high-stakes plot (at least for me… I mean, they’re all high stakes, but these two got me somehow, I don’t know. maybe you’d be “got” by a different pair of them) and that setting that I appreciated so much. Also a real knock-down, drag-out OK Coral sort of final scene that really got me going.

Do you read Reacher? Which one is your favorite? And if you don’t – why not?!? No, I jest, sort of. We don’t all have the same tastes. But for suspense and action, I couldn’t recommend it more highly. If not this one, what’s your favorite series? And do you have a favorite within it?

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: audio, mystery, Reacher, thriller |