61 Hours

Coming off Gone Tomorrow (2009), one of the very best among his 13 high-octane thrillers, Child keeps his foot hard on the throttle. There’s always a ticking clock in the background whenever our off-the-grid hero, Jack Reacher, finds a wrong that needs righting, but this time the clock drives the narrative. When a lawyer arrives at a South Dakota prison to visit a client, we’re told that it’s five minutes to three in the afternoon, “exactly 61 hours before it happened.” Meanwhile, Reacher wakes up from a nap to discover that the tour bus on which he’s cadged a ride is spinning out of control on an icy bridge. By the time he helps the injured senior citizens aboard the bus, there are 59 hours left. But we still don’t know what we’re waiting for. The clock continues to tick as Reacher, now without a ride, lands in Boulton, South Dakota, and finds himself helping out the local police as they attempt to protect a key witness in an upcoming drug trial. Then there’s the matter of the peculiar underground installation outside of town, formerly a military outpost but now apparently housing a meth lab. As the hours fall away and the tension builds, we learn more about the installation, the local cops, and a Mexican drug lord whose own clock is ticking in sync with Reacher’s, but we’re still not prepared for what happens when the sixty-first hour arrives. One expects a novel organized around a clock to be plot driven, and that’s certainly true here. But, as always, Child delivers enough juicy details about the landscape, the characters, and Reacher’s idiosyncrasies to give the story texture and to lower our pulse rates, if only momentarily. Even without the apparently game-changing finale, this is Child in top form, but isn’t he always?

61 Hours just may be one of the best novels in the Reacher series yet. Although not as fast paced as previous entries, it boasts "a Hitchcockian escalation of tension" that, despite the gimmick of a countdown, becomes all the more powerful because of it (Telegraph). It is also more of a "closed-town mystery of the sort that Agatha Christie favored," though, of course, Reacher remains the same uncanny, music-loving drifter fans have come to love (New York Times). Otherwise, Child exhibits his usual gift for characters (particularly the elderly librarian), sharp dialogue, and edge-of-your-seat suspense. Although 61 Hours ends with a cliffhanger, readers need not worry: the 15th Reacher novel is due out this fall.

After a brief stop in New York City (Gone Tomorrow), Jack Reacher is back in his element—Smalltown, U.S.A.—in bestseller Child's fine 14th thriller to feature the roving ex-military cop. When a tour bus on which he bummed a ride skids off the road and crashes, Reacher finds himself in Bolton, S.Dak., a tiny burg with big problems. A highly sophisticated methamphetamine lab run by a vicious Mexican drug cartel has begun operating outside town at an abandoned military facility. After figuring out the snow-bound, marooned Reacher's smart, great with weapons, and capable of tapping military intelligence, the helpless local cops enlist his assistance, and, as always, he displays plenty of derring-do, mental acuity, and good old-fashioned decency. While the action is slower than usual, series fans will appreciate some new insights that Child provides into his hero's psyche and background as well as a cliffhanger ending.