Thriller fans have everything to gain by reading Lee Child’s NOTHING TO LOSE. The 12th adventure for ex-military cop Jack Reacher is the best since his rise to bestsellerdom.
The novel finds Reacher literally wandering aimlessly across America, when he finds himself at the border of two small Colorado towns: Hope and Despair, both aptly named. Heading into the latter, he stops at the only diner for a cup of joe, but instead gets dirty looks, refused service and an ultimatum from some local muscle: Leave now.
Reacher being Reacher, he doesn’t, which gets himself arrested. The next day, the court declares him a vagrant, since he holds no regular job, which means he cannot legally re-enter town following a police escort back to Hope. Again, Reacher being Reacher, he re-enters anyway. After all, what exactly is a town like Despair trying to hide?
Turns out, of course, a lot. As he slowly gleans from the few people who cooperate, Despair is virtually a one-employer town, and that employer is Thurman, a portly, wealthy businessman who owns the metal recycling plant and fancies himself quite the end-times enthusiast. He plays the residents like puppets, but Reacher takes it upon himself to get tangled in their strings when a couple of young men suspiciously turn up dead in Despair’s desert.
Like a dumped girlfriend who just keeps coming back, Reacher continues to make return trips to Despair to snoop around, sometimes in the dead of night, and sometimes with the help of Vaughn, Hope’s friendly female police officer. Some visits work out better than others — for Reacher, at least; the reader benefits when they don’t, and our hero simultaneously has to endure and deliver several beatdowns.
But some of NOTHING TO LOSE’s best sparring is all verbal, particularly in Child’s back-and-forth dialogue between the hard-headed Reacher and the obviously corrupt Thurman. The author’s style hasn’t changed much, but it has improved from the ultra-clipped method of PERSUADER — the first Reacher novel I read — which relied heavily — and frustratingly — on incomplete sentences. Here, Reacher’s exploits have more heft, in both prose and plot, with an ending you won’t soon forget.
A dozen books deep, Jack Reacher may just now be hitting his true stride. —Rod Lott
“Got one chair leg in the guy’s solar plexus and another in his gut.”
and
“Behind it lies the celiac plexus, the largest autonomic nerve in the abdominal cavity. Sometimes called the solar plexus.”
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• BAD LUCK AND TROUBLE by Lee Child
• THE HARD WAY by Lee Child
Related posts:
- Introducing the SOLAR PLEXUS WATCH!
- Bad Luck and Trouble
- The Hard Way
- Separated at Death
- L.A. Outlaws
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve read all the Reacher books and, from what I’ve seen so far, seem to be alone in thinking this isn’t one of the better books in the series. The worst problem is that it’s too long. By the time Reacher figured out what the bad guys were up to, I’d just about ceased to care. Then there’s the whole subplot about the women with missing husbands/boyfriends, which really never ties in with the main plot. By all means read it–there’s no such thing as a bad Reacher novel, and this one certainly has its pleasures. But it’s just not up there with my favorites: “Bad Luck and Trouble” and “Running Blind”.
That’s a good point about the subplot; I thought it was just me, being margarita-inebriated when I finished the last few chapters.
‘Nothing To Lose’ is the book that one cannot finish due to the excess number of pages. You are right, Michael, it is too long and this is the main disadvantages of the above book
It’s only 400 pages, which isn’t out of the ordinary these days.
This is the first Jack Reacher book that I have disliked. I loved the scene in the diner at the beginning, and I like hardboiled narrative exposition (like the example you give). It just went downhill in the hurry. As we’ve mentioned above, the subplot with the wives was irritating. It never fit in with the main plot in any but the most trivial manner, and (without getting into spoiler country) since I’m in the military, let’s just say it doesn’t ring true at all. Second, the villain just wasn’t bad enough. Sure, the villain’s plan was as evil as they come, but his conflict with Reacher seemed rather half-hearted. I would explain that more, but it’s tough to do without the spoilers. Finally, the town that is a feudal possession of one man thing had been done already (and much better) by Reacher in Killing Floor. Thurman is just a low rent Kliner (from Killing Floor). In fact, I might just go re-read that one.
Look, don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot of good stuff here. I particularly liked the how Child showed the genesis of the names of the dueling towns. However, this is to me easily the worst of the Reacher books. Granted, that is a high standard, but this is the first of the books that has left me feeling like the whole is much less than the sum of the parts. Wait for it to become available at your library.
There are a lot of problems with this nook.
1) Depleted uranium is esentially inert. It is called depleted because the slightly radioactive U-235 has been removed, leaving only the barely radioactive U-238. It is literally a million times more toxic as a chemical poison than as a radiological agent – but less so than arsenic or mercury. And no, one could not detect depleted uranium inside a shipping container by infrared scanning. The radiation energy from U-238 is about 1/80 of a watt per metric tonne. There is very little control over its disposition. It is used for various industrial and mechanical purposes because of its density, such as counterweights for elevators. IOW, one doesn’t need to steal it, one can buy it.
2) The armed forces don’t chase AWOLs. If a serviceman deserts, he forfeits all pay and benefits. He has the wanted status against him, if he ever gets arrested or otherwise involved with the government, and has to turn himself in and take punishment to get clear. But the idea of an underground railroad smuggling deserters to Canada is silly.
Mr. Child needs to do better research – much better.