Breaking News! Jack Reacher acquires a cell phone!

So, this might not be so much a review of Lee Child’s Gone Tomorrow (Random House Audio, 2009) as perhaps some random observations, no pun intended. I mean, by now the plot of a typical Jack Reacher novel is relatively predictable. It goes like this:

Reacher rolls into town. Something attracts his attention/Someone does something he doesn’t like. Reacher kicks the living shit out of about a dozen guys (often in groups of three or more). Things being now more to his liking, Reacher moves on.

Going too much deeper into the plot of Gone Tomorrow would spoil it for a lot of people, notwithstanding the facts that Child’s plots don’t vary all that much and the plot of this book is especially non-ingenious. (It revolves around a MacGuffin that would have embarrassed even Alfred Hitchcock.) But, we really don’t read Jack Reacher novels for the plot, do we?

I certainly don’t. I read them for the attitude, and, as I’ve pointed out in a previous review, I shamelessly enjoy these books, as preposterous as they are. What might be more interesting than the plot in Gone Tomorrow are these enticing little tidbits:

• We learn that Reacher is an equal-opportunity ass-whooper.

• Reacher gives new meaning to “riding the subway” (hint: think of Malibu or the north shore of the island of Oahu).

• He’s not yet texting people with the abandon of a 14-year-old Hannah Montana wannabe, but he does make some serious use of cell phones that he’s lifted off a few of his victims.

And here’s something else I find interesting about Gone Tomorrow. It’s told in the first person. This isn’t unprecedented in the Jack Reacher series, but it’s unusual. And it makes me wonder why Child decided to take this approach. Of course, we’re not talking stream of consciousness here in any Joycean or Faulknerian sense. Reacher reports an occasional emotion, but, let’s face it . . . he isn’t Mr. Introspection. He travels light and puts down no roots, and that lifestyle is reflected in his interior existence as well. Hell, it’s even reflected in Child’s prose style. Which, I guess, is all good.

It’s just that when I encounter a first-person narration, I expect a little more dimension—if not introspection, then at least some humor. Unfortunately, as we all know, Reacher has no sense of humor. The model for this in my opinion is Raymond Chandler’s hero Philip Marlowe. Of course, Chandler is a far superior writer, and Reacher and Marlowe are totally different characters. Well, maybe not totally different. Marlowe is more cerebral, but, to tell you the truth, I don’t want Reacher to turn reflective. I like it when he’s out there pulverizing bad guys and pontificating on arcane topics like the weight of subway cars in the New York City transit system and the behavior of propellant gases in the Heckler & Koch MP5SD 9mm submachine gun.

Seriously.

As for the reader of Gone Tomorrow, well, what can you say about Dick Hill? He is Jack Reacher. It wouldn’t surprise me if Dick Hill were in therapy, trying desperately to maintain some wall of separation between himself and his alter ego. Hill has the occasionally irritating habit of going all Runyonesque on the listener when doing the voices of some of the bad guys in the book, but come to think of it, what else would you do with these characters? It’s not like they have any complexity.

We’re not looking for that, remember?

Not quite so wild about Harry (this time)

I’ve listened to most of the Harry Bosch books by Michael Connelly, and I remember enjoying them at the time. The problem is, I don’t remember them all that well. It’s not just Connelly’s books, either. All these plots and characters of the genre sort of run together for me. I’m not sure if it’s because of the audio medium—maybe it isn’t “sticky” enough for my cognitive processes—or the limitations of the genre itself. If I had the time, I’d go back and listen again to the Bosch series, but I don’t. Who does? And, anyway, aren’t these books supposed to be able to stand alone, even if they’re supported by a considerable backstory?

I recall that Bosch is something of a hard-ass. He can be stubborn and a bit of a hothead in pursuit of the bad guys. He goes on instinct a lot and doesn’t play nice sometimes with his peers or, especially, his superiors.

But, I’m sorry, in 9 Dragons (Hachette Audio, 2009), Connelly’s latest Bosch adventure, Harry Bosch almost turns into Harry Botch.

He and his partner, Ignacio Ferras, are drawn into the homicide of John Li, the owner of a couple of convenience stores. He manages the store in the bad L.A. neighborhood, while his son, Robert, manages the more upscale branch in the Valley. Li has been shot in what appears to be part of a long-running extortion scheme (well, it’s not even a scheme, really; it’s more like a cultural ritual) whereby a Chinese gang known as the triad demands protection pay-offs from local Chinese merchants. As the case progresses, Bosch zeroes in on a likely suspect, Bo-Jing Chang, a triad thug, in pretty short order. As Chang indicates that he is about to flee justice, Bosh and his colleague, David Chu (a detective with the Asian Gang Unit), arrest him for murder and use some esoteric technicalities of the LAPD booking process to keep him in jail over the weekend.

Meanwhile, Bosch gets an anonymous call that he assumes is from a member of the triad warning him to back off the case or there will be consequences of a decidedly negative sort. He takes this in stride, but soon after, when he receives a video from his daughter Madeline’s cell indicating that she has been abducted, his attitude and temperament change.

Before you can say Great Leap Forward, Bosch is on a plane headed for Hong Kong, where he truly begins to make a mess of things. In perhaps the most spectacular example, he gets his ex-wife, Eleanor Wish, killed in a robbery attempt after flashing his wad in a seedy hotel full of low-lifes. This is a cop with street smarts?

In his defense, Bosch is under some strain. His daughter’s life is in danger and he doesn’t have much time. Still, his behavior seems reckless and unprofessional. Consider:

• Enamored of his own detective prowess, Bosch has fallen for some misdirection that one would think a cop of his experience and intelligence would not fall for.

• He underestimates the subtlety and intelligence of his both his Chinese allies and enemies, not to mention the inventiveness of teenage girls with mother issues (perhaps a tautology) and the latest technology at their disposal. Bosch’s daughter’s manipulation of her father is predictable (in fact, I thought it would turn out to be more devious than it actually was), but Harry doesn’t see it coming.

• Bosch also badgers his street-shy partner, Ferras (who, to be fair, largely deserves it), to the extent that he behaves rashly in an effort to redeem himself in Harry’s eyes and pays for it with his life.

Early in the novel we learn that Bosch has been at the convenience story crime scene years before, at which time the late Mr. Li gave him a pack of matches with a fortune printed on the inside cover. Bosch’s fortune reads: Happy is the man who finds refuge in himself. I guess that’s positive, except that perhaps Harry takes it a bit too far in 9 Dragons with his Lone Ranger act.

Len Cariou does just an outstanding job of reading 9 Dragons, as he has in other Harry Bosch books. He is especially good with the Chinese accents—they sound authentic without sounding stereotyped. And in a way that I can’t explain—perhaps it’s the ability of a veteran performer to interpret the character—he redeems Bosch, making him sound more sympathetic than he sometimes deserves, at least in this installment.

Village of the Domed

As one of the latest in a long list of narratives in the “reversion to savagery in the face of annihilation/apocalypse” genre, Under the Dome (2009, Simon & Schuster Audio) by Stephen King asks the question, “How long would it take your average New England small town to descend into abject barbarity once it is cut off from the “civilizing” influences of the rest of the world by a mysterious transparent dome that allows no one to enter or leave?”

Without giving too much away, I can tell you that the answer is not very damn long, especially when the townspeople, left to their own singularly meager devices, basically submit to the will of the book’s major villain, second select-man James Rennie. Nor do most of the townspeople struggle much against Rennie before submitting. Rather, the inhabitants of Chester’s Mill, which inexplicably and suddenly finds itself encased by the dome one fine October morning, fold faster than grandstand seats in a downpour (King, as everyone knows, is a fervent Boston Red Sox fan).

In any event, King doesn’t give you the sense that many of these people are worth saving. The hero, an Iraq War veteran named Dale Barbara (a nice touch of irony, I suspect, in King’s choice of the name here; Barbara is probably one of the most civilized people in the book), is, of course, worthy, along with his coterie of friends and supporters. But none of them, including Barbie himself (a running “Ken and Barbie” motif weaves its way through the book) performs actions that rise to the heroic, unless you count more or less passively opposing Big Jim Rennie. And it’s not that Barbara doesn’t have some authority. In one of the more impressive battlefield commissions in history, the President of the United States, no less, personally elevates the former lieutenant to colonel, re-activates him and puts him in charge of the town and the operation to save it, such as there can be said to be an operation.

Alas, all of this appears to be of little avail as Rennie, a hypocritical fundamentalist Christian, used car dealer, drug lord and all-around bully puts together a private army of young thugs to augment the official town police force and begins ruthlessly to take over. Rennie is evil, but at least he’s somewhat sane. His son, Junior, is just plain batshit. He’s got it in for Barbara—it’s not completely clear why—but then Junior doesn’t have top-drawer reasoning faculties anyway. Together Rennie pere and fils conspire to neutralize Barbara and seize control of the town while the dome is intact and interference from outside authorities is non-existent.

Along the way, as is usually the case in a King novel, we meet lots of interesting characters. A word of caution, though. You don’t want to get too attached to any of these people. King has a way of killing them off willy-nilly. Some of the more colorful of these characters, in addition to the ones already mentioned, include “Chef” Bushey, who gets his name for his prowess in cooking up methamphetamine, Julia Shumway, Barbara’s principle ally and editor of the town paper, and Rusty Everett, a physician’s assistant who has been unofficially elevated to the position of the only doctor in town, and, as you can imagine (this, again, being a Stephen King novel), has a lot on his particular plate.

King does a good job of setting an atmosphere of isolation bordering on claustrophobia and the fear that it engenders in the local population. I’m not sure the book had to be as long as it is; King sometimes veers into narrative culs-de-sac and kind of idles in them for a while, but the story basically moves along, although with a rising sense of futility in terms of resolution.

Raúl Esparza does an excellent job of holding the long story together with his fine narration. Oh, I could quibble. At one point, referring to the army unit known as the Big Red One, it sounds like he says, big red one (accent on “red”), which kind of threw me off for a moment. And, I swear, at one point, one of the local cops sounds exactly like Officer Wigguns of “The Simpsons” (about which more in a moment). On the other hand, I think Esparza absolutely nails Big Jim Rennie, giving him a lugubrious near-drawl that just oozes menace and mendacity.

When Under the Dome first appeared, more than one reviewer commented on the similarities to the plot of the first full-length movie of “The Simpsons,” called, well, The Simpsons Movie. Viewers of that movie will remember that a dome descends on Springfield causing much havoc that Homer only manages to exacerbate in his unique way. I admit it was the first thing I thought of as well. King has explained that he started this book decades ago, so that the coincidence of device is just that. King felt so strongly about discouraging any suggestion that he was influenced by The Simpsons Movie that he released typescripts of an early version of Under the Dome to make his case (viewable on Wikipedia). But nobody would mistake King’s Chester’s Mill with the wacky Springfield of the cartoon world, unless you want to think of it as Springfield gone way over to the dark side. Way, way over.

James Lee Burke rains…er, reigns!

First: a disclaimer: I confess to liking James Lee Burke’s work very much. Second: another perhaps irrelevant fact — James Lee Burke is the only author whose books I have never actually read, but have only listened to. I haven’t listened to all of them — I’ve probably gotten through about half to three-quarters of the Dave Robicheaux books and a couple of the Billy Bob Holland books if, as I recall, those are the ones that take place in Texas/Montana. What I especially like about Burke’s oeuvre is that he demonstrates an actual ability to write, unlike some of his competitors in this field. Sure, he can wax poetic, but he never gets tedious. He lets the story unfold and never tells you more than you need to know.

Rain Gods seems to me to be one of Burke’s more ambitious efforts. It takes place in Texas where the main character, Hackberry Holland, is a local sheriff. The action starts when his office receives an anonymous phone call — although we learn quickly who the caller is — about the massacre of some Asian women and their, uhhh, unceremonious burial near a church. The caller (Pete Flores) has gotten himself involved in this crime, although he has no direct responsibility for it. He is an Iraqi war veteran who has hooked up with a waitress who plays guitar on the side offering tunes like “Will the circle be unbroken?” to the rowdy patrons of the honky-tonks where she works.
This premise seems simple enough, but Burke finds a way to complicate it. Or maybe “complicate” is not the right word. He finds a way to expand upon it—in a good way.

Burke is one of the more evocative and lyrical writers in the mystery genre. And that’s a good thing, because he’s also heavily into allegory and archetypal characters, which, in the hands of inferior writers, are like those targets that pop up on police firing ranges. Take for example, the Bad Guy in Rain Gods. The alpha Bad Guy, that is, Preacher Jack Collins. He is a professional hit man of almost superhuman reputation (evading capture, walking through walls, prescient, preternaturally cunning) who refers frequently and apparently without irony to The Bible and lives by some sort of code that may be meant to ennoble him, but basically makes him weirdly vulnerable, especially to women, who shoot him, assault him with cooking vessels and poison him with impunity. He also works with perhaps the most incompetent crew since the villains in Home Alone. Of course, sociopathic religious zealots have been a staple of fiction since, like, forever, and this is genre fiction, so the tendency towards cliché is pronounced. Fortunately, Burke is too good a writer to fall completely into that trap; Collins has enough dimension to save him from caricature.

So does his main adversary, Sheriff Holland, who, what with his experiences as a POW in Korea (he may have given up some of his comrades), his disastrous first marriage, his days of drinking and whoring and the profoundly impactful death of his second wife, carries enough baggage around with him to remind you of Jacob Marley and his frickin’ chains—a basically good man who made some bad choices. This is all very frustrating to his deputy, Pam Tibbs, who is smitten with Hack, but can’t seem to penetrate that ole Clint-Eastwood-in-Unforgiven exterior. That one of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies brought to mind the earlier reference to pop-up targets on the pistol range probably says something about Burke’s fiction, but I’m not sure what. I happen to like Clint Eastwood’s work a lot too, and he sometimes has that allegory thing running hot, as well (remember Pale Rider?).

Together, Hack and his deputy try to track down Preacher Collins before he can cause any more damage—except that time after time the Preacher is one step ahead of them and perfectly positioned to wreak the kind of havoc that his street cred would seem to require. Unaccountably, however, it seems that Preacher Collins’ alternative nickname could be “Catch-And-Release” Collins. And that’s probably as far as I can go with that without issuing a spoiler alert.

Really, I’m making Rain Gods sound much more cartoonish that it is. In fact, it is an engrossing and emotionally moving tale with rich characterization and a superb sense of place. Along the way, Burke has pertinent and insightful things to say about honor, loyalty, courage and, for lack of a better term, perseverance.

The narrator, Will Patton, does his usually stellar job bringing Burke’s characters to life. Oh, I could nitpick. He says “Bar man” at one point, making it sound like someone who serves up drinks at the local pub, when I think he should have said B-A-R man (an infantryman who carried a specific type of weapon—a Browning Automatic Rifle, no doubt during the Korean War that Holland was reminiscing about when the term came up). But Patton’s mistakes are rare indeed, and he embodies Burke’s characters so convincingly that one is happy to overlook the infrequent stumble.

Okay, one more confession. I’m sure that the title of this book has some significance. That’s the purpose of a title, right? Unfortunately, I missed it. No doubt my mind wandered at that point (or points) in the book where I should have been making connections like that. It can happen when you’re listening to these books while you’re running, which is almost the only circumstance under which I listen to them. There’s traffic to deal with, terrain to negotiate, weather—like rain sometimes—to factor in. You can get distracted from the performance. I’m going to blame it on this, rather than obtuseness on my part or obscurity on the part of the author. I have this wretched sense of the impending, smack-myself-in-the-forehead, how-could-I-have-missed-that? moment when it all becomes clear and I’m humiliated by the obviousness of it all, but for now, I’m clueless.

Brad Meltzer doesn’t nail it it The Book of Lies

So, let’s see if I have this right:  The comic book hero, Superman, has some connection with Cain, survivor of history’s (loosely defined) First Sibling Rivalry. Well, that’s some serious high-concept stuff. Higher than those tall buildings Superman was able to leap in a single bound, before he learned to fly, I guess. That’s the premise of The Book of Lies, the latest from Brad Meltzer. For me, this kind of thing often quickly turns into gobbledygook, but I stick with it anyway.  I did the same thing with The DaVinci Code, a book that spawned enough industries to fund the bailouts of an entire planet full of financial markets and which I despised. I just don’t get it, but, apparently, lots of people do.

You have to give Meltzer credit for attempting this kind of literary high-wire act. So much can go wrong. Plot elements are prone to spinning out of control; coincidences wildly exceed plausibility; swept up into the manic and improbable action, characters can become cartoonish. . . .

Unless, wait, hold on.

Is Meltzer doing this on purpose? The book’s central plot has to do with Jerry Seigel, one of the creators of a very cartoonish guy—Superman. Well, not cartoonish in the sense of silly or insubstantial, but you know what I mean. And from what I understand, Meltzer has an interest in comic books.

See, listening to a novel like The Book of Lies is kind of like listening to an inaugural speech by George Bush, or, better yet, any public pronouncement by Sarah Palin. You’re thinking to yourself, he/she can’t be that stupid. Nobody is that stupid. And, of course, if he/she can’t be that stupid, he/she must be a genius. With these people, there’s no middle ground. And so you go back and forth like this, genius/moron, genius/moron until, ultimately, your judgment is determined by the last thought you’ve been whipsawed into. Think of Faye Dunaway in Chinatown explaining the appearance of a young girl to Jack Nicholson: she’s my sister (slap!)/she’s my daughter (slap!).

Or you eat a gun barrel.

But seriously, what got me to thinking Meltzer might be doing something interesting with the narrative is the action sequences, specifically the fight scenes. Taken literally, they are ridiculous. The timing is all off and the action itself is stylized, sort of like listening to an account of hand-to-hand combat in a kabuki play. Yet, if you put each element of these fight scenes on a panel, illustrate them and throw in a few Pows!, Blams! and Arghhs!, you’d have your basic superhero comic book. You might also start thinking about how the great James Joyce did a version of this kind of thing in Ulysses (about which much more in future posts).

But just when you think maybe you’ve underestimated Brad Meltzer, he does something to bring you back to the awful reality that he is not a very good storyteller (at least in this book) and an even worse writer. Take, for example, the plot. Meltzer’s protagonist, Cal Harper spends his days in South Florida rescuing street people—literally nabbing them on the streets and hustling them off to shelters. One night, one of his “clients” turns out (conveniently) to be his father (a not-too-subtle father-son motif permeates the book) who has been shot. This father has been absent from Cal’s life for years, the father having spent the better part of a decade in prison for the murder of Cal’s mother, an event Cal witnessed as a young boy. Cal takes the old man to the hospital—his wound is superficial—and from there, the narrative gains some velocity, if not coherence. It seems that Cal’s father is trying to smuggle some interesting contraband into the country. I think this contraband is the weapon that Cain used to kill his brother, Abel. Or, maybe it’s just a book. Or maybe the book is the weapon. In any event, it seems that the answer is to be found in the boyhood home of Superman’s creator.

So it’s off to Cleveland with law enforcement and bad guys in pursuit. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the bad guys have some tenuous connection to the Nazis, by way of the Thules, whoever they are. In high-concept-speak, the idea is The DaVinci Code meets Raiders of the Lost Ark. What happens in Cleveland is a lot of mysterious stuff that never really makes much sense, and which is certainly never resolved by the end of the book. Part of the reason for this, I think, is that the idea that anyone would really care what weapon Cain used to kill Abel is highly questionable. Maybe the writer or writers of that section of the Bible left it out for a good reason—IT WASN’T RELEVANT.

Going much further into the plot would give too much away (although, that might be a good thing), so let’s talk about style.  Meltzer is the kind of writer who constructs phrases such as the following:  “‘What are you doing?’ I challenge.” The challenge is implicit in the question.  Meltzer doesn’t have to get into the tautology of “I challenge.” “I said” would do just fine. This probably sounds like nitpicking, and if the incidence of this were rare, I’d let it go.  But this kind of thing occurs regularly in the book and drives me crazy.

So does this:  ‘“Do you understand what I do, I ask,’ my thick Adam’s apple pumping with each syllable.” The speaker is the main character, Cal Harper, speaking in the first person. Can he see his own Adam’s apple pumping? Or does he just feel it? And if that’s the case, how does that work? What is it pumping? Or is it just going up and down, and, again, how does Cal see that? It seems to me to be a problem of point of view, but on a greater scale, why does Meltzer even mention it?

Slap! Oh, I get it. It’s a leitmotif. Meltzer is subtly sounding one or more of the major themes of the book—the father-son thing (if you accept the biblical account of creation, Adam is the father of all of us, right?)  and, perhaps, by extension the central myth of Cain and Abel.

Slap! Or probably not.

I actually chose to download this audiobook because its narrator is Scott Brick, whose work I have admired since I first listened to his reading of Nelson DeMille’s The Lion’s Game. But as good as Brick is, even he can’t save this one, although you can hear him trying. In fact, he tries too hard to infuse the narrative with suspense and even a bit of humor. It comes off as emoting. Unless . . . he was supposed to?

Slap!

One run, a few hits, some errors

I’m not exactly sure when professional killers began to be treated more sympathetically as fictional characters. And I’m even less certain why. Obviously, their line of work is morally reprehensible. Assassins have traditionally been frowned upon as role models, right? Yet, in the movies, at least, an entire subgenre of likeable—even inspiring—hit man narratives has emerged. The first of these to get my attention was Luc Besson’s The Professional, with Jean Reno.  Then came the campier hit Grosse Pointe Blank with John Cusack. Recently Ben Kingsley played an alcoholic button man in You Kill Me. And in the case of each of these movies, it was hard not to root for the killer.

The same is true in Hit and Run (Harper Audio, 2008), the new effort from Lawrence Block about his hit man hero (or, would it be antihero?) John Keller. John Paul Keller to be exact, or, as his manager/friend Dot puts it, “Just Plain Keller.” Hit and Run is the latest in the Keller series, and, notwithstanding the character’s charms, the least satisfying.

Not that the book isn’t well written. Block is one of the true masters of the form, right up there with Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke and Nelson DeMille. His prose is clean, his storytelling is plausible (given the quasi-implausibility of the character’s career choice) and Keller has some complexity and depth, even though we know almost nothing about him. Well, we know some things. He collects stamps. He lives in an apartment in New York. He likes the New York Times crossword puzzle. And he kills people for money.

Maybe the book just suffers from comparison with its predecessors in the series. In a sick sort of way, it was fun in the previous books to follow Keller from job to job, each assignment calling on his ingenuity and resourcefulness. Usually Block was smart enough to make us care for Keller’s victims just to the point that it kicked up the narrative tension a notch, so that he just wasn’t making the rounds.

In Hit and Run, however, Keller is forced to go on the lam and incognito after being framed for the assassination of a governor, I believe it was of Ohio. The African-American governor of Ohio, to be precise. (Talk about implausible. By the way, there is something off-putting about the fictional assassination of a black political leader in this season of the presidential campaign. I don’t believe for a second that Block was being in any way provocative—I just wouldn’t have gone there.)

Most of the book is taken up with his efforts to avoid detection and capture as he tries to make his way back to safety, until he realizes that there really isn’t anywhere he can be safe anymore. He has no money, he has every reason to believe that his only friend, Dot, has died at the hands of those who betrayed him and his face has been on enough newscasts to make him familiar to 95% of the population.

At this point, nearly out of options, he is wandering the streets of New Orleans when he hears the screams of a woman and has to decide whether, in the name of self-preservation, he flees the scene or comes to her aid. Knowing the kind of guy Keller is, I don’t think I’m spoiling it to say that he decides to intervene. And, of course, that marks a turning point in the story.

All of this is kind of like The Fugitive, except that much of the drama is missing. No villain is hot on Keller’s trail. He really only faces one crisis of recognition when the owner of an out-of-the-way gas station challenges him, only to be dispatched by Keller with none of his usual flair or inventiveness. In his defense, he was under some urgency to get it done. So, it’s Fugitive-Lite, with a twist. That twist is, for Keller to clear his name he would have to reveal his very criminal past.

Two other quick points:  1) The plot of Hit and Run deprives the listener of much of the humor present in the earlier Keller books, one of their most appealing features. I think it’s because Keller has less interaction with Dot in this one.

2) The book is read by Richard Poe. He does a serviceable job; sometimes the emphasis seems to be on the wrong word, but I have no serious objections to his reading. Unfortunately, he’s handicapped in a way by having had to follow Robert Forster, who did one or two of the previous Keller books (I think Block might have read a couple of Keller books himself) and, for me, Forster is the definitive Keller. If Keller returns in another adventure—and that’s not exactly clear given the “resolution” of Hit and Run—I hope Forster is available.

Reacher vs. Preacher

At or near the top of the Mt. Everest that is my pile of guilty listening pleasures sits Jack Reacher, hero of twelve novels about the same character by the English writer Lee Child.

Jack Reacher is one-dimensional and improbable, though not totally implausible, which is his salvation as a character.  That, and he has some other interesting quirks such as an unerring internal clock (with an alarm feature) and arcane knowledge, such as the average time it takes for the typical middle-aged rural couple to answer the doorbell. He’s also very particular about the vessels that contain his coffee.  I could try to explain all this, but maybe you should hear it from Reacher.

In Nothing to Lose, he chafes against the hostility of a small town called Despair, Colorado, and, really, who could blame him?  All he wants to do is get a bite to eat at the local diner.  Instead, what passes for law enforcement in the town shows up and earnestly invites him to leave.  Reacher fans will know that kind of treatment will invariably get his attention.  Bones will be broken, inanimate objects will be vaporized and general havoc will ensue. Jack Reacher is a big guy—six-five or so and 250-pounds-plus of muscle and sinew—and a former military policeman who’s obviously had some training in dealing with unruly adversaries, so he’s capable of rendering any man–or gang of men for that matter–into a runny mass of protoplasm in physical confrontations that usually last about 30 seconds.

And Despair just ain’t hospitable.  After all, the folks in Hope, just down the road, seemed a lot nicer.  They didn’t arrest him and then run him out of town.  Yeah, that’s right—Hope and Despair.  But before you run to your computer to try to locate these towns on Google Maps, we’re talking allegory here, in a playful sort of way.  More on the allegorical aspects of Jack Reacher in a moment.

Reacher is the kind of guy who can’t let a slight like this go, so, no sooner is he deposited at the city limits than he’s making his clandestine way back to Despair to try to find out what dirty little (or, in this case, not so little) secrets it is trying to conceal.  During this foray, he observes a huge and ominous recycling operation on the outskirts of Despair and, on the way back, he stumbles over a dead body, which proves that the town doesn’t have the whole recycling thing down quite yet. Each of these clues, as you might imagine, figures in the nefarious covert activities of the citizens of Despair.

The major villain in Nothing to Lose is the owner of the recycling operation and of the town of Despair.  He’s also the town’s spiritual leader and an “end time’s” enthusiast, which basically tells you all you need to know about him (and about the plot). Reacher’s one ally is a female cop from Hope, who’s referred to only as Vaughn, but before you start into any homoerotic speculation about Reacher, keep in mind that he is ex-military and military types typically refer to their fellow human beings—even love interests—by their last names only.  As a veteran, I can attest to this.

Besides, Reacher is too much of an archetype to be sexually ambiguous.  He’s kind of a cross between the Christian of The Pilgrim’s Progress and the loner hero of countless movies and TV series, with a strong emphasis on the latter, given Reacher’s decidedly secular tendencies. He’s Shane on steroids.  Unfortunately, Reacher has all the sense of humor of a hitching-post.  Still, he’s someone you really don’t want to piss off, which, after twelve books, you’d think the bad guys would have learned.  Of course, you could say the same about the American electorate, but that would be a whole different topic.

Dick Hill is the voice of Jack Reacher in Nothing to Lose, as he has been, I believe, for all the other Reacher books.  Hill is not my favorite audiobook performer.  He seems to me to lack the range and versatility of, say, the great Alfred Molina (if you haven’t experienced Molina’s work on Larry McMurtry’s Berrybender Narratives, stop whatever meaningless activity you are engaged in—including reading this post—get to your nearest bookstore or library and listen to these audiobooks), but his laconic style seems somehow appropriate to the Jack Reacher character.

Reacher has been making his nomadic way diagonally across the country in the general direction of San Diego, so, depending on the rigor of his itinerary, we can probably expect at least three or four more novels from Mr. Child with, perhaps, adventures in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California. I, for one, will be looking forward to them.