- What the hell, Farmer, a series book?
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What of it, Judgey McJudgerson?
- But don’t you usually read SRS LITRATURE?
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Mostly, yeah. But I also travel a bunch. There’s a place for junk food in one’s diet.
- Aren’t these books mostly all the same, though?
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No idea what you mean. See, this is the one where Reacher ends up investigating an improbable conspiracy, and then has to take it down more or less single-handledly.
- And this is different from the other ten you ready because?
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Um. Right. Still, good fun. This one was mildly different because it was the first written post-9/11, which forces some changes on Reacher’s behavior. Also, I was on vacation. There was drinking. And a beach.
Miscellaneous Heathen
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
I just finished the fourth Reacher. He kicks ass. And Tom Cruise playing him in a movie is an abomination unto God.
Oh, yeah, and I did love your assessment of the basic plots of all of them. It’s like that episode of the Rockford Files where Jim gets framed for a crime he didn’t commit, and gets beaten up trying to clear his name.
Or the episode of “Three’s Company” where there’s some sort of misunderstanding.
In some ways, BL&T is a (mild) departure, but what Child did here is akin to what Robert Parker did from time to time with Reacher’s ancestor, Spenser: he rolled up a set of ancillary badasses. The Spenser novel I remember him doing this in was “Potshot,” and (because of Spenser’s deeper mythos) the extra badasses were all folks who’d cropped up in prior stories. (Dedicated Spenser fans know that Hawk isn’t the only guy who had Spenser’s back; in “Potshot”, Spenser rallies a team of six, including Hawk.)
Child can’t do this, because Reacher has no support structure. The closest thing to it is the occasional recurrence of Frances Neagley, an old colleague from the Special Investigations unit Reacher served in. (Frazer, you’ll meet her in “Without Fail,” which is #6.) BL&T brings in the whole unit.