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PERSUADER
by Lee Child
Dell, March 2004
496 pages
$7.99
ISBN: 0440241006


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

There's suspense and then there's SUSPENSE with capital letters, and Lee Child is the current master of the latter. The first page of PERSUADER starts out with a cop being marked for death, and the unremitting action doesn't stop until the last page. In between, thugs are pounded into pulp, shot into semblances of Swiss cheese, and made to say "uncle" as if they were asking their favorite relative for Christmas presents. But not without a cost -- the good guys will lose some, too.

Jack Reacher is recruited by Federal agents who are launching an operation unauthorized by their superiors against the kingpin of a gang of suspected drug smugglers. He succeeds in penetrating the smugglers' well-protected citadel perched at the end of a lonely road on the coast of Maine. He ingratiates himself enough to be invited in, but only as a probationer whose life is no more sacrosanct than that of any other "asshole," the name by which the second-echelon gangsters disdainfully call him.

By cleverness, guts, and a little judicious culling, he works his way up in the hierarchy, but in doing so he has to take chances, and each chance leaves him a little more vulnerable and susceptible to discovery. Readers can chew their fingernails and hear their hearts bounce with anticipatory fear as they vicariously follow in Reacher's footsteps.

Reacher himself comes within a hair's breath of utter catastrophe time after time after time. From the fire into the frying pan into the cauldron. But he doesn't flinch. If you thought James Bond was cool at playing Monte Carlo roulette, see Reacher playing the Russian version of the game. He is completely reckless in respecting human life, his own as well as others, although he likes to rationalize killing as much as he can. One baddie is just the gang's computer geek, but he deserves what Reacher's going to give him because his computer savvy condemned one of the good guys.

Without even thinking about the reason why, the Feds who recruit Reacher routinely start taking orders from the the strongest one among them, the outside guy, Reacher. What's in it for him? From his distant past as an officer in the Army MPs, he has recognized someone who fiendishly tortured to death a woman who worked for him, and Reacher always gets even. Sure, he'll help pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the Feds, even though he'll probably get burned doing it, just as long as they don't interfere with the vengeance he intends to wreak on his enemy.

With a character like Reacher and a plot like this one, the seventh of the Reacher novels, Lee Child has progressed to achieving the big-time accolades in crime fiction. His novels now make the Literary Guild, the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Doubleday Book Club, and the Mystery Guild.There's a nostalgic newness about the way Child writes. There's a bit of Mickey Spillane in his offerings, but only a bit. In Reacher's propensity to attract savagely punishing beatings to himself, Child reminds one of the protagonists created by Hammett and Chandler, but without the hangdog loser aspect. He is sui generis.

In PERSUADER we see an avenger whose world view allows him to empathize with the wife and wimpish son of a thoroughly despicable criminal, and to care for how his actions might endanger them, even if these people might be tacitly aiding his enemy. He's a loner with a gentle side, and in this, from among all the justice-seeking loners of crime fiction, he even calls to mind the Lone Ranger. But again, he's really just himself, the only one of his kind, the brightest star to come along in the crime fiction world in a long time, and he'll make you turn those pages so fast that the breeze they create will obviate any need for air conditioning.

Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, March 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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