Copyright 2013 by Lee Child. Published by Delacorte Press.
This is one of Lee Child’s popular mystery/adventure books featuring Jack Reacher. Reacher, for those of you who aren’t familiar with him, is a former MP standing 6′ 5″ and weighing 250 pounds. I mention his size only to remind those who think “Tom Cruise” when they hear “Jack Reacher.” The casting director who decided that an actor who stands 5′ 7″ and weighs in at about 150 pounds was the right choice for playing Reacher is either an idiot or took a sizable bribe.
I mention this miscasting because one of the more vivid scenes in Never Go Back is Jack Reacher, sharing a tiny bathroom aboard a transcontinental flight with a US Army soldier and, in those close confines, breaking both of the soldier’s elbows. I don’t know how the director of the movie is going to make that scene plausible. Tom Cruise would have a hard time breaking a wishbone at Thanksgiving, much less a soldier’s elbows.
Actually, the scene is pretty implausible in the book, too. Try to imagine a soldier having both elbows brutally snapped then meekly returning to his middle seat to sit quietly for 3 hours until the plane lands. This is after Reacher breaks four fingers on another soldier on the plane, who also endures the excruciating pain without a peep. Both incidents of mayhem occur without any passengers noticing. Not plausible.
But great fun. I finished this book in under a week, which is the fastest read that I have had in some time.
The thumbnail plot is that Reacher, a drifter by profession, hitchhikes to Virginia to meet the CO of the 110th MP corps, a unit he commanded when he was still employed by Uncle Sam. The reason he traveled for over a week to get there? He wanted to take her out to dinner because she had a nice voice.
As a retired man I understand doing stupid stuff for no good reason, so I can’t fault him for going to Virginia. But when he gets there he finds that she has been arrested for embezzlement and he himself is visited by a couple of Army thugs who warn him to leave town or face arrest on a 16-year-old manslaughter charge and a paternity suit. Reacher, never one to run, decides to stick around to see what the heck is going on. Soon a third charge is added: attempted murder on the jailed woman’s attorney. Reacher is thrown into jail, too. The same jail where the cute CO, Susan, is cooling her heels.
He concocts a scheme to break both of them out of jail. It succeeds, of course, and the rest of the book has Jack and Susan traveling across the country, dodging people who want to arrest and/or harm them. They gather clues along the way. Eventually Jack meets his purported daughter and they solve the mystery, while screwing their brains out at every opportunity.
Fun on the run.
And fun to read.
8 out of 10.