Echo Burning

Jack Reacher always seems to end up on the wrong side of the law. It's almost as if he thrives on being framed. Damned if he does...damned if he doesn't. This time, on the run for beating up a cop, Reacher finds himself involved with helping a battered Mexican woman escape her racist white husband. Even when all signs point to Carmen being a liar Reacher stays. Even when he has the means to walk away from this prejudice drama Reacher stays. He stays because he believes Carmen and her small daughter really are in grave danger. [My comment here is for all Reacher's insistence to avoid real world attachments, for he has no clothes, no house, no bank accounts, no car, no family or friends...he certainly gets entrapped by attachments of the show more heart often enough. He can't say no to a lady in need. But, this is the first time in the series Reacher doesn't get sexually involved. Carmen certainly tries to seduce him in order to guarantee his help getting away from her husband; and the woman Reacher is attracted to turns out to be a lesbian.
But, back to the plot. This is Texas where the heat is oppressive and ranch families are even more so. Reacher's damsel in distress finally takes matters into her own hands. Again, Reacher could walk away. Case closed. But. He can't. show less

"Echo Burning" has Jack Reacher bouncing aimlessly around Texas, where his "Mess with me and you get what you get" attitude is in danger of getting him some jail time, when a beautiful, well-dressed latino woman in a posh car stops to give him a lift, sells him her tale of woe and asks him to kill her abusive husband. Reacher says no but can't quite bring himself to walk away.

I liked the idea that there was something Reacher would say no to. He knows himself well enough to realize that he's saying no not because the idea of killing a bad man bothers him but because he lacks the personal involvement he needs before he can unleash his righteous anger. Reacher sees himself as a hot-headed killer, not a cold-blooded one.

The plot of "Echo show more Burning" has more mystery to it than some of the Reacher books. It seems everyone Reacher meets lies to him. Some much so that he begins to doubt his own judgement. Some of the lies are so beautifully told that I shared Reacher's inability to distinguish truth from deception. This effect was added to by the fact that the good guys are less good and the bad guys less bad than in the typical Jack Reacher novel. Reach is invited to follow in the footsteps of a famous Texas lawman, Clay Allison, who " never killed a man that did not need killing" but to do that, he'd first have to figure out who deserves to die.

Lee Child turns up the heat by having a parallel story about a killing crew being brough to Texas to take out specific targets. As the reader, you know these stories are connected but making the connection gives you something else to puzzle over.

The deception in the book shows how vulnerable Reacher's "don't mess with me or mine" code makes him to being turned into a weapon targeted by someone else's agenda. At times, Reacher seems border-line sane in this novel. He's rational but his view of what constitutes a normal reaction to a threat and his disregard for the law is so far out of line that is seems pathological.

In "Echo Burning" Lee Child makes Texas itself a character in his story. I've only been to Texas a few times, and only to the big cities on business, but Lee Child's description of the State matched my memory: a mix of heat and humidity that means you can sweat through your clothes stepping from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned lobby, a distance between places that means people think nothing of driving an hour to get to a restaurant, huge skies and endless, deserted roads.

Lee Child gives a very unforgiving view of the Texas legal system as being on the side of the rich and powerful. He also brings anti-latino racism into sharp focus.

My favourite character in the book was Ellie, an earnest and brave six and a half year old little girl who is impossible not to root for.

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Lee Child has developed a character and a series with a large following who have bought thousands of copies of his books. If you are one of them, that's great. Carry on reading more installments of Jack Reacher's adventures.

If you haven't read Echo Burning or are new to Lee Child, then you should know that this book is painfully awful.

There are no believable people in Echo Burning, only stereotypes. The men are either black hats or white hats, and there's little doubt about who's which. The women are witches, princesses, or non-entities. So reading the book is akin to playing with a child's edition of Sleeping Beauty with pre-perforated punchouts that can be set up on an improvised stage.

This weakness applies to Jack Reacher himself. show more He's a drifter constantly on the move from one cheap motel to another, travelling always to wherever the next bus is going. He travels with only a toothbrush, which he abandons in Chapter 1 and never replaces. He buys new cheap clothes every few days to avoid laundering the ones he's wearing. It's not clear how he shaves.

We suspect early on that Reacher is a psychopath; any doubt disappears well before the end of the book. This could be interesting if Child made any use of it. He doesn't. Reacher behaves like a psychopath because that's the simplest way parts of the plot will work. Nevertheless he has a girlfriend who lives abroad. How someone with no home, no mailing address, and no phone could even begin a relationship, let alone maintain one, is unexplored.

The writing is sloppy and undisciplined, and so the book is perhaps a third longer than suits its content. Once we've been told in detail about a woman's makeup, we can figure out for ourselves that there will be lipstick on the napkin she uses to dab her lips. All the occurances of the short paragraph, "Reacher said nothing," would fill many pages if collected. Other people also say nothing, so at times the dialogue threatens to fall eerily silent. Reacher becomes especially speechless just when communication would seem to be most necessary. Yet at other times his monologues last for pages. The gunfight --- you already knew there would be a gunfight, didn't you? --- takes place after a long, very busy, horribly hot day and after sunset in the deep darkness of the desert during a violent thunderstorm with torrential, bone-chilling rain. People die. Without a beat, Reacher returns to the ranch house and, as a west Texas version of Miss Marple, settles into the parlour with the survivors. In a debriefing that goes on and on he unravels the plot and unmasks the villain, who is present of course. This is pretty much redundant since, thanks to the big messy handprints that are all over the plot, we knew what was up long before.

So the plotting isn't great either. An early and crucial incident relies on a criminal lawyer who doesn't know his legal rights and can't recognize fake FBI insignia in full daylight. Child makes much of Reacher's uncanny intuition and understanding of the criminal mind. Before anyone knows for sure that one of the victims is even dead, Reacher is able to tell the police exactly where --- in the unmarked desert --- they will find the body. At the end of the book, many pages reconstruct how Reacher uses his little grey cells to figure out which of many nondescript motels the last of the hired killers is holed up in. It doesn't occur to him that the room keys will be in the pockets of the two he has just killed or in their car, which he has stolen and is now riding in.

The surviving killer has a hostage who needs to be rescued. Reacher has intuited the motel, but which is the room? Child doesn't explain why the register is unhelpful here. The units of the motel are built around a central courtyard, unit facing unit, window facing window. Fortunately for Reacher, the highly disciplined professional killer who is holding an unhappy abductee at gunpoint hasn't bothered to pull the drapes. The Hollywood Superman thing happens, the bad guy is knocked out, and the hostage saved unharmed. The state police arrive to haul the bad guy away, at which point they disappear completely --- no witness statements, no evidence team. Reacher continues to use the killers' rented car, which by now is material evidence in five murders, two attempted murders, and two abductions. It's that kind of book.

There are lots of good whodunits and crime thrillers out there. Echo Burning isn't one of them. show less

My favorite part of the book came at the end when Jack slips away to thumb his way to yet another unknown destination... reminded me of the old Incredible Hulk tv show where Bruce has to keep moving on! But really, the author keeps the reader guessing - throwing out red herrings and suggesting unreliable narrators. It is fitting that Jack solves the day by listening to his intuition and picking up the subtle clues.

One of the ongoing delights of the Jack Reacher series is the way that Lee Child subtly shifts the tone from one book to the next, as if he's determined to write at least one book in each of the classic sub-genres of the thriller. Killing Floor is a revenge story, Tripwire a story about a brilliant serial killer, The Enemy a military-intrigue tale, and One Shot a nifty inversion of the classic locked-room mystery.

Echo Burning is Child's take on another classic thriller plot: the story of a lone stranger who wanders into a corrupt town and refuses to leave until he's exposed its slimy, black heart to the sunlight. The sunlight, in this case, is more than metaphorical. The life-sucking summer heat of West Texas is a character in its own show more right, and Child creates a strong sense of place. Reacher is his usual competent self, quick with his mind as well as his fists, but he is far less laconic than usual. His contempt for the bad guys and what they represent is frequently, openly expressed, sometimes with shocking ferocity. "Righteous anger" isn't a phrase that usually comes to mind in connection with Jack Reacher, but it certainly fits here. The result is an offbeat, but very satisfying, entry in the series. show less

(First reviewed at Blogcritics at http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/10/11/140121.php)

The fifth novel in the Jack Reacher series (by Lee Child) brings Reacher to Texas, near the Mexican border. He is drawn into the complex affairs of Carmen Greer, a woman of Hispanic origins, married to a wealthy Texas oilman named Sloop Greer who, she says, secretly beats her. At the beginning, Sloop is in prison serving a sentence for tax evasion, and she fears what will happen when he comes home. When he comes home, Sloop is shot and Carmen is arrested for his murder. Meanwhile a squad of hired killers is killing off Sloop's contacts.

The story moves at a nice pace, with the double climax of a bloody gun battle between Reacher and the death squad, show more and the discovery of who was responsible for most of the violence and death.

Child seems to move surely through rural America and manages to sound like an American, although he is a British ex-patriate. He seems to have done his homework in firearms, police procedure, court process and history. He makes the odd mistake - in one scene Reacher gazes into a box of pistol cartridges "sitting on their firing pins." I don't know if factory ammunition is packed primer down, but the firing pin is part of the gun, not the cartridge. On the whole, he manages to make his characters and story sound credible.

Reacher is a unique and interesting character. He practices disengagement. He travels by hitchhiking and stays in cheap hotels. He buys cheap clothes and throws them out instead of laundering them. He is a 6' 4", 250 lb ex-military policeman, who gets into fights in bars, but he seems to avoid police attention. He is a bit of a smart-ass and sometimes just a prick. He continually gives the names of 19th century American presidents when asked for his name, and seems to make fun of the many waitresses and hotel clerks who don't get the joke. He seems to be well read, and he seems to have disengaged from the world through a sense of distaste for the social order. Within a few pages he answers a quote from Balzac ("Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught" with a quote from Marcuse ("Law and order are always and everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy"). At the same time, he is not cynical or mean.

It's hard to say if Child has deliberately created Reacher as a composite character. He seems to have the itinerant lifestyle and the cultural eye of Travis McGee, taken to an extreme, the supercilious sarcasm of Spenser, and the evil temper of Dave Robicheaux. It's hard to avoid those comparisons within the ambit of mystery fiction, in which the protagonist is always a knight-errant or a Lone Ranger, on a quest for justice in a dark world. Reacher has more of a lone Samurai quality (or perhaps a Dirty Harry quality), because he seems to be entirely without connections or roots, living to his own code of honour.

Child does well with many other characters. They speak distinctively, and they are credible, rather than stereotypes. The exceptions, in this book, are the gang of hired killers. They are faceless, nameless entities, practicing an unimaginable trade. Probably Child decided to leave them as vaguely malevolent non-entities, doomed to die when they come up against the hand of the hero.

Child has a good eye and ear, and he writes a vivid, hot, dusty Texas. However Texas seems to come out badly. The wealthy Texas families seem in this book are crude racists. The blue collar Texas are redneck cowboys. The only good Texan seems to the the Jewish lesbian lawyer from the east who agrees to defend Carmen. This is partly a function of the way Child writes Reacher, who must transcend a corrupt milieu to dispense justice, but I think that Child might be more subtle and tolerant of local culture.

I think the Reacher series is considerably better than the average mystery-adventure series. show less

I have been leery of the Reacher series ever since I read the one where Reacher was self-described as looking like a condom stuffed with walnuts, an image so outrageously revolting it turned me off the character. Another negative is the idea, not quite so prevalent in this earlier book, is the idea that if you determine you are in the right, then whatever actions you might wish to take are justified. The Hell with the law and the legal system; you're right so violence of any kind is justified. Were that kind of vigilantism be permitted by society, there would be no more civil society because each individual would determine his own "right." It would be one big free-for-all.

That being said, this book had far less of that mind-set than show more the later works and especially the movies. Reacher doesn't want to be in the situation, things are not as they seem, and there is far less of the usual Reacher misogyny, so I rather enjoyed this book. show less