The first 4 volumes, from printi.com

I have published the first four volumes of the blog – 2011 through 2014 – and have the 2015 volume ready for print. But my chosen printer – printi.com – has disappeared. Apparently they have been gobbled up by VistaPrint. Their website now redirects me to the VistaPrint website. But I have been unable to find similar booklet publishing services available through VistaPrint. The only spiral-bound booklets they offer have plastic bindings, which I deem unacceptable. So I am looking for a new printer. Not how I wanted to spend my holiday time.

Copyright 2016 by Lee Child, published by Delacorte Press.

This is the 21st book in the Jack Reacher series.  I like all of the Jack Reacher books.  He is larger than life, sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, always analytical and never predictable.  All of which makes for a good read.

In Night School he is in the army – which is somewhat confusing as he had mustered out in some of the earlier books.  Apparently these stories are not chronological.  But they almost always stand on their own, so it is not a fatal flaw.  At some point maybe I will try to go back and put them in sequence.  But not today.

The premise of this one is that Reacher has been ordered back to the classroom, ostensibly to learn about the latest developments in interagency cooperation.  But it is a cover, of course, for a clandestine operation.  A small group, consisting initially of a CIA agent, an FBI agent and an MP (Reacher) has been assembled to look into an alarming report of  possible terrorist activity in Germany.  It quickly develops that an AWOL soldier is selling something to a terrorist group for $100 million.  The question is what.  What could a lowly soldier from a mundane unit in Germany have acquired that could command that price?  What could interest a terrorist group for that kind of money?  It has to be small (because a single man stole it) and simple (because it can’t require a lot of training or support to be used).  It also has to be something that has slipped between the cracks in the military’s inventory control because nothing of that value is missing.

It is a puzzler, all right, but Reacher loves puzzles.  He also loves that the liaison with the NSC is an attractive woman who falls for Reacher’s charms and is more than willing to share his bed between forays into the field in search of clues.

Once the culprit is identified to be the AWOL grunt and it becomes obvious that his theft is the culmination of a plan that formed years earlier, before he even joined the army, the investigation tries to figure out what the plan is by interviewing people from his past.  The most salient clue is a cryptic comment he made to a fellow soldier that he joined the army “because of Davy Crockett.”

Of course the team figures it all out eventually and just in the nick of time, with about 95% of the credit due to Reacher and his insights.  They all get a medal.

Not the most compelling Reacher story I have ever read, but damn good still.

8 out of 10.