Make Me

Make Me is the twentieth book in the Jack Reacher series. Once again Lee Child delivers for the reader, this Reacher has pace and power, and everything you would expect. This is a detective story, a battle of psychology, plenty of violence with some lust thrown in.

Jack Reacher is on a train, where the journey will end in Chicago, and is examining the stops on the map. He notices a place called Mother’s Rest, and he decides to get off and investigate the place, it must have a museum explaining its unusual name. A woman approaches him when he gets off the train, but he is not the person who she is expecting, even so she walks with Reacher to the local motel. Both are being watched.

Reacher is wandering about Mother’s Rest trying to show more find out how the place gained its name, but there is no museum, and the locals do not know either. What Reacher does notice is that he is being followed, and that there must be some sort of telephone tree at work. When he enters the diner for his breakfast, he also finds the woman he spoke to the previous evening.

The woman explains that she is a private detective and a former FBI agent, Michelle Chang, who was waiting for her colleague who had contacted her asking to meet in Mother’s Rest. As yet he had not appeared, and nobody in the town seemed willing to discuss anything about him. So, Reacher decides to stay around and help Chang find her colleague, and at the same time find out more about Mother’s Rest.

They begin to work together searching for her missing colleague and if there are any clues as to his whereabouts. What they do get is various snippets of information, but they need more. This means they have to travel to Oklahoma City, buy even that leaves them with many unanswered questions. They are being watched wherever they go.

Their search leads them to some of the darkest places on the dark web. Even they are not prepared for what they find. That will take a strong stomach, and a few noxious smells along with an all-out violent defence of themselves. What they do find disturbs them, but Reacher will make sure it all works out.

Another winning Reacher thriller with plenty of violence. Make Me grabs you by the throat and holds you all the way to the end. Second to None. 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

Here's a minor revelation: Jack Reacher can be injured and by a single adversary too. Not sure that counts as a spoiler. He alights from a train in Mother's Rest, OK mostly to find out how the town got its name. He meets a retired FBI agent, turned PI, named Michelle Chang, and takes a liking to her and her investigation into the disappearance of a business partner, Keever. Something is not right in the town, and they track down a L.A. writer and a source in Chicago, who thinks he has discovered something about the goings-on in Mother's Rest. Taut writing, with the usual implausibilities, but one of the better books of late.

Another great Reacher book. The bad stuff happens in, or close to, somewhere very remote in Oklahoma in one of those unwelcoming and threatening towns that Child seems to be able to describe so capably. The crime, or bad stuff, they're hiding is elusive and one only finds out near the end and it's a creative one. The action also moves around other locales in the US.

As usual, the main attraction to Reacher isn't the vigilante violence but the great descriptions and Reacher's thinking.

If you like Reacher you'll like this one.

The beginning of “Make Me” felt like I read this Jack Reacher book before. He gets off the train in the middle of nowhere in a town called Mother’s Rest and there’s a woman waiting to pick someone up at the train station. She’s former FBI looking for her partner who’s not on the train so she walks back to the only motel in town with Reacher. There’s something funny going on in this town and they team up to find out what happened to her partner. Slowly the clues are presented.

The only thing that will have me reading the next one that something happens to Reacher that makes him realize he does have vulnerabilities’ and is not superhuman. Gave it two and half stars because of the grisly topic and to see if Reacher bounces show more back in the next book. 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

While I still enjoy the Reacher books, they are becoming a bit repetitive. I know that Lee Child has said that the character is not intended to evolve (though one element of possible evolution did occur in this book), but the lack of evolution is beginning to make the character and the series feel a bit stale. This particular book featured numerous repetitive elements (some obviously intended for stylistic purposes, others not), but that led to a degree of tedium in the story. More importantly, I found it both distracting and annoying that at least one of the principal characters in this book seemed to speak in the exact same "voice" as Reacher (which is, of course, one of the things that distinguishes him). Finally, I saw the "big show more reveal" coming as soon as a few pieces of information were revealed. Oh, well. show less