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One of the highwater marks of any year is the appearance of a new Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. Reacher may well be one of the most enigmatic characters in modern fiction. He simply appears in each new installment without preamble in a particular city and finds trouble --- or trouble finds him. He does what he needs to do and then moves on. What remains particularly impressive is the manner in which Child takes a character who in the hands of a lesser writer would have been a one-trick pony and keeps him fresh and new by slowly revealing facets of his personality without reinventing him. At the same time, Reacher's flawed perfection makes him continually interesting; for all of his superlatives, he often can be wrong. One of Reacher's major strengths is his adaptability, his ability to recognize his mistakes and correct them almost immediately.
Child brings all of these elements to the fore in THE HARD WAY, the latest and perhaps best Reacher book to date. It begins with Reacher drinking a cup of coffee at a café in New York's Greenwich Village. We're not sure how he happens to be there or how he arrived; we only know that Reacher had visited the place the night before, liked it, and uncharacteristically came back for a second visit. It is this return that causes him to be involved in a kidnap for ransom. Unbeknownst to Reacher, it appears he witnessed the pickup of the ransom demand during his initial visit to the coffee shop. Edward Lane, the object of this demand, wants to know what Reacher saw. Lane's wife and stepdaughter have been kidnapped, and he wants them back. Lane was victimized five years previously, and although he paid the ransom, his wife at the time was brutally murdered. Lane does not want a repeat performance. So when he becomes aware of Reacher's powers of observation, as well as his experience as a military policeman and other talents, Lane hires him to find his family.
It soon appears, however, that the kidnap victims have met the same fate as Lane's first wife. Nothing though is as it seems. Reacher slowly discovers the truth about Lane from a number of diverse and unexpected sources, and slowly works his way through a series of puzzles and multiple webs of deceit. A note here: THE HARD WAY, though ultimately a thriller, is at heart a mystery, and a good one. Aficionados of the latter genre will no doubt figure out the major plotline fairly early on. It is a mark of Child's talent, however, that one of the most riveting elements of this book is the manner in which Reacher's two-steps-forward, one-step-back investigation proceeds.
Child continues to demonstrate his ability to keep the reader in the room, so to speak, at all times. There was one point near the novel's conclusion where I was literally screaming "Don't do that!" at a character, wanting to take them by force and drag them away from what they were about to do. That, I would submit, is the work of an author at the top of his craft.
With THE HARD WAY, Child demonstrates that he and Reacher are just getting started rather than slowing down. Child will no doubt have an audience for these books for as long as he continues to write them. Very highly, and repeatedly, recommended.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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