While I won’t claim it’s his best, or even that great, I found this latest (19th) Jack Reacher story an intriguing enough premise, a rapid page-turner (including the ballistics details which others found boring but which I enjoyed), a truly scary bad guy, and an unexpected punch-to-the-gut ending.
Someone has taken a long-distance shot at the French president, but special bullet-proof glass protected him from assassination. The CIA decides, along with Europe’s top intelligence agencies, that this was just a practice run aimed at the real target: the upcoming G8 meeting of the world’s top heads of state in London, and specifically the US president. The long-distance shot would have been an amazing 1400-yard bulls-eye if not for the special protection glass, and so the world’s best long-range snipers—all of whom have turned mercenary—go on the short list, and a general is brought out of disgruntled semi-retirement to head the global search for the would-be assassin. He in turn drags in our hero Reacher, who is out there doing his ‘freedom’ thing on the US highways and byways, along with his folding toothbrush/ and disposable clothes.
Why bring in Reacher, a long-retired US Army MP? Well, it just happens that the American sniper on the list had just finished a long jail sentence, and is single-mindedly in hate with the man who put him there, who just happens to be Reacher. So the general figures Reacher has a personal stake in catching the guy. Get it? Personal.
Paired with a 20-something female CIA agent named Nice (!), who never really steps out of the middle-aged Reacher’s shadow, our hero tracks the psycho-killer relentlessly. First to his home in the American Midwest, long abandoned but with a room papered over with homemade Jack Reacher firing range targets; then to Paris where the original assassination attempt was made and where a timely gust of wind saves Reacher from getting his head blown off; and finally to London—the author’s home town. It is in London where Reacher confronts his greatest challenge, which turns out not to be the assassin John Kott, but his paid protector “Little Joey,” a gangland enforcer who manages to dwarf our 6’5” hero in both height and strength, and matches him in cunning, as well.
The ending, as with all of Child’s Reacher thrillers, is a foregone conclusion. The undiminished Reacher survives to catch the nearest bus and disappear, always ready to fight another day. While some of Child’s novels end with a certain pathos, such as when the woman who might just possibly keep Reacher from disappearing either gets killed or called back to duty, Personal ends with a stunner that, frankly, I didn’t see coming at all. I’ll leave it to all you Reacher fans out there to get your own copies and experience it for yourselves.
