The Hard Way

A great read. Well plotted with a welcome absence of excruciatingly boring detail of roads, rooms and kit in the majority of the book. Unfortunately these rear up in the final shoot out act but the mot enjoyable in the series so far.

I have read most of the Reacher books by Lee Child but found THE HARD WAY to be slow and tedious until the final quarter of the story. It all begins in New York City and ends in England.

During most of the book, Reacher and company are watching and going through everything with a fine-tuned comb sans the action that usually accompanies his stories. The story takes a few twists and turns and new evidence is uncovered. A rarity, Jack also ends up in the sack with a former FBI agent who teams up with him to uncover the truth.

At 75% complete, there is a final twist to the storyline which makes it more appealing with plenty of action. If the rest of the book would have maintained that pace, it would have been a real page-turner, As book show more number 10 in a series of 27, I expected much more. show less

I love the Jack Reacher books. I love the guy and what he does and how he does it. But I don't love the war and government bits. I put up with them but I don't love them. And in his, his latest adventure, I don't have to. I get the best of Reacher without the baggage. He's having a cup of coffee in New York City when he gets sucked into using his skills to find a kidnapped woman and child. I also appreciate that Child does not use the woman and/or child victims as helpless plot ploys. Oh I hope we get more Reachers like this one.

Yes, the premise is ridiculous and if you examine the plot too closely your ears will start to bleed. But that's besides the point. The balance of tension and action, the succinct writing style, the humour, the hero fantasy, and pathos towards the downtrodden all culminate in a near perfect audiobook experience.

The Hard Way If "The Hard Way" has been my first Jack Reacher book, I might not have read a second. This is a puzzle book, spiced with graphic violence but lacking in any real emotional engagement.

I quite liked the start, Reacher, minding his own business in NYC gets pulled into the affairs of a group of mercenaries that even he can see are ethically challenged. The first third of the book was entertaining, the usual Reacher-Figures-It-Out stuff, focused around whether or not there was a kidnapping and if there was, who the bad guy was. The only departure from previous books was that the beautiful woman Reacher sets out to rescue appears only as a photograph.

For me, things started to go wrong when Reacher discovered a former member of show more the mercenary team who was left behind in Africa, imprisoned and mutilated. I'm sure the details of this are not an exaggeration of what happens in Africa and it was central to the plot and motivated some of Reacher's subsequent actions but it was so long and so detailed and so repulsive that it felt like a kind of pornography.

By the second half of the book, Reacher has acquired a female partner, an attractive (of course) older woman that he spends time with. Sadly, she remained primarily a plot device to gain access to information and contacts that Reacher couldn't have achieved alone.

The second half of the book is set in England. It was fun to see how Lee Child, an English writer, would present England through the eyes of his all-American hero. I thought it was a good effort, accurate but seen from a distance. Unfortunately, Dick Hill, the audiobook narrator, struggles to do any kind of English accent and definitely can't muster a Norfolk dialect. He was bad enough to be quite distracting. The big reveal in the second half of the book is so heavily foreshadowed that I became impatient with it.

I thought the image of Reacher tearing around the Norfolk countryside in a Mini was fun but I couldn't understand why he didn't buy or hire a GPS system. The book was published in 2006, so it pre-dates the iPhone but I was already using a portable TomTom satnav by then. Of course Reacher also needed to have the concept of a Text Message explained to him so perhaps he's just too much of a dinosaur. He occasionally comes across as aging and out of touch in this book. His Army days are getting further and further behind him and he seems to be losing context.

The denouement wasn't very satisfying. The baddy was too gaga and sadistic to be convincing. Reacher saved the day all by himself but I didn't quite believe it. And what was with recurring statements like: "Reacher alone in the dark - invincible". Are they an attempt at humour? If Reacher was a different guy I'd suspect self-mockery but Jack Reacher wouldn't see the point.

In this book, Reacher is a puzzle-solving killing machine whose only real challenge was in deciding who he should be killing this time. Lee Child seemed to be trying to offset the lack of emotional engagement with any of the characters in the book by scaling up the violence, real and threatened, with all the subtlety of a "SAW" movie. Not a book I'd recommend to a friend. show less

This was my first Jack Reacher following friends' recommendations. It is a fast-paced action thriller which carries you along with the plot twists and it is only afterwards you start to think about the holes in the story. This one attracted me as it was partly set in New York City and partly in Norfolk, somewhere I know. The NYC scenes and settings seemed authentic to someone who doesn't know the city and so were the Norfolk ones, albeit mostly not real places. A good read if you don't think about the plot too deeply.

This is number ten in the crime/adventure series featuring Jack Reacher, an ex-Military Police officer from the Army Criminal Investigation Command, or CID. (He retired after thirteen years, having received an honorable discharge “with hiccups” in his career, on account of being “not a very cooperative guy.”)

Jack is “a lonely man” by choice, and, as Stephen King describes him, is “the coolest continuing series character now on offer.” He’s 6’5”, 250 pounds, early 40’s, short fair hair, and blue eyes, and women gravitate to him like iron filings to a magnet.

At a New York City cafe, Jack happens to witness a kidnap ransom retrieval. Edward Lane, the victim’s husband, hires Reacher to find his wife Kate and her show more daughter Jade. This sort of trouble isn’t new to the husband; his first wife, Anne, was kidnapped and killed five years previously. On the one hand it seems like a suspicious coincidence, but on the other, Lane runs a lucrative overseas mercenary operation that attracts a lot of enemies. This business, Operational Security Consultants, subcontracts to contractors of the U.S. Government (many layers to help eliminate oversight). These mercenaries help fight wars in the Third World in which the U.S. wants (surreptitiously) to affect the outcome.

For assistance, Jack enlists the help of the retired female FBI agent, Lauren Pauling, who worked on Lane's first wife Anne’s kidnapping. Pauling is ten years older than Reacher but “he liked what he saw.” [Gotta love an author whose hot male protagonists find older women attractive!] They proceed to collaborate in many ways….

The story moves to the English countryside outside of London, and the tension ratchets up. It would not be spoilery to say that Jack ends up once again saving the day, because that’s his role.

Discussion: Jack is unbeatable and indestructible. He’s the strong, silent type, and seems to require little more in life than his fold-up portable toothbrush. (There’s no mention of toothpaste to go with it – probably would just bog him down….) He travels around without a suitcase, without a permanent home, and without clothes, books, a Blackberry, an IPhone, an IPad, grooming tools, deodorant, or condoms. And yet, needless to say, he knows lots of stuff, and has lots of talents.

Evaluation: Why are these books so appealing? I have no idea, but I enjoy them almost as much as my husband, who loves the fantasy of an invincible male with no responsibilities or obligations. There’s not an ounce of nuance anywhere, and yet I’ve never read a Reacher book I didn’t enjoy. (I also never read one I didn’t forget in a week, but that’s another issue.) These books are written as a series, but can be read as standalones. show less