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It is 1997 and the US army has a problem at an out-of-the-way army base in Mississippi, where a young girl has been found murdered. Fort Kelham is apparently being used for the secret deployment of army personnel into Kosovo where war is expected to break out. Jack Reacher, a military policeman, is given the task of carrying out a highly unofficial investigation. He is told that the commander of one of the companies at the base is the son of an influential senator and that it would be highly embarrassing if any of his men were found to have been involved. Perhaps a word about the writing is in order because the story is told in the first person and the way it is told gives us an insight into the mind of Jack Reacher. There is a point in the book where Reacher visits Washington DC anticipating an attempt on his life and decides to allow himself to be observed in order to get his assailant to show himself. He writes: "No point in being the bait in a trap, and then hiding your light under a bushel. Not that I had ever been sure what a bushel was. Some kind of small barrel, I assumed. In which case the light would go out anyway for want of oxygen." The bushel metaphor doesn't make any sense here and we really don't need to be informed whether he knows what one is or not. Then it is made even worse by his extending the metaphor and prattling about a barrel (a bushel isn't a barrel, anyway), and the light going out owing to lack of oxygen. If this were an isolated example of pointless verbosity such criticism could be dismissed as nit-picking but the book is full of it. He is in a 'dilemma' as to whether or not to buy a shirt, eventually decides to do so and takes two pages to describe how he managed it. Somebody writing a Reader's Digest version would have no difficulty in reducing this book to about two hundred pages and would have improved it in the process. The dialogue (or at least Reacher's part in it) is not much better. It is based on the style employed by private investigators like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, although Reacher has none of their attractiveness. You can almost hear him saying to himself, "I have to be 'hardboiled', economical/clipped/laconic in my speech and above all I must be cool." He seems totally incapable of carrying on a normal conversation with anyone and is always on the lookout for a smart remark or a put down - something that begins to pall after a few pages and becomes more and more tedious as the book progresses. As far as characters are concerned, there really is nobody but Reacher, although nobody else is strictly necessary because he can solve every riddle, spot every clue, and jump to every correct conclusion all by himself. He is apparently physically formidable, afraid of nothing and more than capable of beating up any number of men all at the same time – qualities which are described at great length in incidents entirely irrelevant to the plot. However, if it is the author's intention to make him heroic then he should not have shown him carrying out acts which can only be regarded as those of an unreconstructed thug. The plot limps along, much of it being quite unbelievable, and the ending is just as unsurprising as it is unpleasant. § Arnold Taylor is a retired Examinations Board Officer, amateur writer and even more amateur bridge player.
Reviewed by Arnold Taylor, September 2011
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