Make Me

This year I planned to read all of the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child….if I could. I read the first book in the series (The Killing Floor)

https://novelmeals.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/the-killing-floor-by-lee-child/

and found it to be a bit gruesome. Lots of action, some intrigue, but grisly. My husband has read all of the series. As a matter of fact, he was finishing up Make Me while I was reading book 1…….he told me that book 1 was indeed a more gruesome book than any of his others. That being said, after we finished Make Me it may also go in the bordering-on-horror style book.

By the way, you don’t have to read these books in order as it’s not a continuing storyline. Therefore, I grabbed the last book when Doug was done with show more it and read Make Me.

Okaaaaaaaay…….these are my only two references to this series and now I am having my doubts about continuing. It’s formulaic writing with a plot consisting of Reacher ending up in a small town, finding himself in the thick of some trouble that he had no part in, meeting a woman (a few are FBI agents), violent engagements he always wins, bedding the female lead in the book, and then it wraps up.

What I liked about this book was Reacher’s deductions and observations on ordinary events, For instance, Reacher and Chang needed to search a room for clues on the Chang’s partner, another former FBI agent who disappeared. Think about the usual places you would check a room. Reacher points out hiding places we’d never think of such as the inside of the air conditioner near the filter in a plastic pouch for service records. Or the inside of the folding louver doors – no one ever sees that part of the door. Brilliant hiding place.

What I didn’t care for in this book was the grisly imagery at the end. Reacher and Chang found out what happened to her partner and discovered a truly evil illegal business. The descriptions of what they found are disturbing and I don’t want them in my head. Like a song that gets stuck, you want to think of something else to replace it and I most certainly need a happy storyline to push this out. It’s dark, it’s disgusting, it’s frightening that such a situation could exist and it’s purely evil. There is a difference between villains and evil, wicked people.

I’d avoid this book, even if you enjoy a suspenseful mystery, because you will have trouble ridding yourself of the imagery. Or maybe that’s me and a small minority of readers. Next I will be reading something cheerful, or chick lit, or a memoir. I may try another Jack Reacher book but strike three and I’m done. Let’s try that another time. show less

Another excellent book from Lee Child as Jack Reacher gets off the train and seeks the origins of Mother's Rest. Dark secrets in town are foretold in chapter one. And, the plot thickens as Reacher, figuratively,bumps into a former FBI agent turned PI, seeking her colleague who came to town and disappeared. Strange behaviors by townspeople pique Reacher's always active curiosity and the chase is on. We explore the Deep Web, take on a Ukrainian Mafia mob and end up back in Mother's Rest for the grand finale. Good story, well told and with all the small towns with dark secrets, this series has a lot of legs left. An issue arises as Reacher and Chang become an item. Clearly, someone will have to make a life style change.

“Why is this town called Mother’s Rest?” That’s all Reacher wants to know. But no one will tell him. It’s a tiny place hidden in a thousand square miles of wheat fields, with a railroad stop, and sullen and watchful people, and a worried woman named Michelle Chang, who mistakes him for someone else: her missing partner in a private investigation she thinks must have started small and then turned lethal.

Reacher has no particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, and there’s something about Chang . . . so he teams up with her and starts to ask around. He thinks: How bad can this thing be? But before long he’s plunged into a desperate race through LA, Chicago, Phoenix, and San Francisco, and through the show more hidden parts of the internet, up against thugs and assassins every step of the way—right back to where he started, in Mother’s Rest, where he must confront the worst nightmare he could imagine.

Walking away would have been easier. But as always, Reacher’s rule is: If you want me to stop, you’re going to have to make me. show less

I'm a huge Jack Reacher fan and have read all the books in the series. I love big, laconic Jack Reacher and I love how he tries to help the little guy. I love how masterful he is at planning strategic moves and I love how he's a rolling stone with no permanent residence. He is all of those things in this book, but the premise behind the threat was too depraved for my taste. That's why 4 stars instead of 5. Child has crafted a good plot around his astonishing premise and that is what kept me reading frantically until the end. It all starts around a lonely little town with the name of Mother's Rest. Reacher gets off the train to Chicago to explore where this strange name came from and he steps right into a rat's nest of intrigue and a show more whole batch of really bad guys. He also meets an ex-FBI agent by the name of Michelle Chang who is searching for a colleague of hers whose last known sighting was at Mother's Rest. The two of them join forces and set out to unravel the mystery of Chang's colleagues disappearance and find themselves right in the middle of a fight for their lives. Good plotting, lots of tension and a nice chemistry between Chang and Reacher make the book very exciting up to the end. But the end is so shocking that it took away a little of the enjoyment of this wild ride of a thriller. show less

Certainly this was not my favorite Jack Reacher novel. It's quite verbose as the author feels the need to set up the ultimate challenge Reacher faces--and takes more than half of the book to do so. That means there's much descriptive language and light character development with almost no narrative tautness. Subtitle for this might have been, "Jack Reacher learns about technology." It's clear that Child wanted to skew younger by making technology such an important aspect of this work, but that means Reacher is playing the role of student, not the most entertaining use of his talents. The villain(s) is also underwritten. For the first time, Reacher's age becomes an issue in the sense of his prior alienation from technology and also his show more ability to avoid injury. He's definitely mortal here, and the book ends with Reacher almost wondering whether he should join AARP. This may be more realistic, but it certainly does nothing for the usual strengths of a Reacher adventure. show less

Sometimes even a restaurant critic just wants to eat a big bag of potato chips, so I pulled this book out of the free box and looked forward to that can't-eat-just-one feeling. Unfortunately, the top half of the bag was stale. It got better toward the bottom, but by that time, I was pretty full of chips and was mostly finishing the bag because I didn't want leftovers.

Which is to say: the first half of this book, over 200 pages, was boring. Reacher wanders into a middle-of-nowhere town for no particular reason. He meets an attractive ex-FBI agent, Shell Chang, as he gets off the train, so he decides to help her look for her missing colleague. In other words, he's restless and looking for trouble so he can break some bad-guy bones. show more Trouble, though, is hard to find. The only action is in the form of a couple of local tough guys who, after a couple of days in which Reacher is more or less provocative, try to tell him to leave town. I thought they were fairly polite about it, but Reacher sends one of them to whatever small towns have instead of an ER and the other one gives him a wide berth from then on. I was almost sympathizing with the locals. Child wants to keep what's really going on a mystery, and Reacher and his friend can't find any evidence of crime, so Child cheats by regularly breaking from Reacher's POV to eavesdrop on a small group of locals mysteriously conspiring. A kind of prologue shows them burying Chang's colleague behind a barn, and that's the only real evidence we have that they really are bad. But it wasn't enough for me. After all, Chang's colleague might have been a real asshole. Nevertheless, Reacher and Chang poke around for 200-plus pages trying to deduce their way in, and fail.

Halfway through, the book livens up a bit. Reacher and Chang meet a reporter for the LA Times who knows people who can help, including a Bay Area hacker who's invented a search engine that can search the Deep Web, the nefarious sites invisible to Google. Someone sends an accomplished hit man after Reacher and Chang. When that doesn't work, they send a sort of Russian mafia SWAT team. This being a Jack Reacher novel, the SWAT mission doens't succeed either. The Deep Web stuff that certain people in the middle-of-nowhere town are involved with is plausibly evil, although we don't find out just how evil until very near the end. It's actually pretty disturbing. I don't buy that such an operation could thrive is a town of maybe 200 or 400 people without everybody in town having a very good idea of what was going on.

I liked that Reacher (no spoilers) shows a little physical vulnerability in this episode — enough to make things difficult for him at times and ratchet up the tension, if not enough to cause him serious trouble in the end. This book was published in 2015 and Reacher talks about having reached an early-adult milestone in 1983, so that puts him in his early 50s when the action takes place. I like that, too, as a fellow getting-older guy. I can't say I couldn't have found better things to read for a couple of days, but you don't eat chips for their nutrition -- you eat them despite the fact that they have none. show less

It is becoming harder to rate books in the Jack Reacher series. This is one of Lee Child's better Reacher novel so if I rate it in comparison with Reacher novels it deserves 4 or 4½ stars. However, if I rate it in comparison with all other novels it probably gets 3 stars. Hence, the 3½ stars I am recording here is a compromise. Still, if you are interested in a Reacher novel this is probably the second best in the series, coming in only behind The Affair.

This book includes the elements that are de rigueur in Reacher novels. Fairly early on he confronts multiple thugs (only two in this instance) and quickly dispatches them in hand to hand combat. He finances himself as he has before by raiding a drug dealer and scooping up a large show more cash and weapons haul. Of course there is a central female figure who quickly succumbs to Reacher's charms and spend the rest of the book bedding down with him. Finally, there is the irrelevant red herring; in this case Reacher suffers a concussion but Child's feeble effort to create suspense as a result is unsuccessful. In short, after all these years the Reacher books are still somewhat interesting but not "gripping."

The feature that sets Make Me above most of the previous Reacher novels is the mystery. It is not clear—in fact, it I didn't have a clue about—what the villains were trying so desperately to protect until almost the very end of the book. The relevance of the dark web was not revealed until ⅔ of the way through the book but even when it became clear that the residents of Mother's Rest were somehow involved in an enterprise involving the dark web the nature of their enterprise wasn't clear. The mystery that was sustained until almost the end kept me engaged. show less