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I read these nearly 400 pages in a single sitting, because that’s how compelling I continue to find Jack Reacher.

At the conclusion of another brief love affair, Reacher takes a bus out of Milwaukee, and gets out to stretch his legs at a comfort stop in a small Wisconsin town. In the window of a pawn shop, he spots a West Point class ring from 2005. It’s tiny; its owner must have been female, and small. He’s bothered: graduating West Point, as a diminutive woman, in 2005 – and whatever might have come afterward in Iraq or Afghanistan – would have been hard, meaningful. She shouldn’t have pawned her ring. Being Reacher, he doesn’t get back on his bus, but instead follows the ring’s tracks backward, through South Dakota into Wyoming.

He liked Wyoming. For its heroic geography, and its heroic climate. And its emptiness. It was the size of the United Kingdom, but it had fewer people in it than Louisville, Kentucky. The Census Bureau called most of it uninhabited. What people there were tended to be straightforward and pleasant. They were happy to leave a person alone.

Reacher country.

Being Reacher, again, he gets into scuffles along the way – in Wisconsin, in South Dakota, in Wyoming – and makes alliances: a retired FBI agent turned PI; a wealthy young woman with a mystery to solve. This installment in the series is satisfying in some of the usual ways. There are brawls and matches of wits, random trivia and landscapes and local color. There is rather less sex than in some Reacher novels (but not none). That last I didn’t mind; I was getting a little sick of Reacher getting laid in the same fashion and with the same type of woman over and over. I’d encourage Lee Child to keep exploring Reacher’s options in this regard. (Although now I have to lobby someone different, don’t I. Fingers crossed for the new guard.) And this time, there are cowboys. Mostly the retired, drug-addicted kind.

I found everything I wanted in this read, which was escapism; action; and the comfort of returning to an old favorite. I’m glad there are still a handful of Reacher books left (written by Child alone) for me to snuggle into.

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