Persuader (Jack Reacher Series #7)

From Barnes & Noble

The Fan Letter by Lee Child

They say the past is another country, and in my case it really was: provincial England at the end of the fifties and the start of the sixties, the last gasp of the post-war era, before it surrendered to the tectonic shift sparked by the Beatles. My family was neither rich nor poor, not that either condition had much meaning in a society with not much to buy and not much to lack. We accumulated toys at the rate of two a year: one on our birthdays, and one at Christmas. We had a big table radio (which we called "the wireless") in the dining room, and in the living room we had a black and white fishbowl television, full of glowing tubes, but there were only two channels, and they went off the air at ten in the evening, after playing the National Anthem, for which some families stood up, and sometimes we saw a double bill at the pictures on a Saturday morning, but apart from that we had no entertainment.

So we read books. As it happens I just saw some old research from that era which broke down reading habits by class (as so much was categorized in England at that time) and which showed that fully fifty percent of the middle class regarded reading as their main leisure activity. The figure for skilled workers was twenty-five percent, and even among laborers ten percent turned to books as a primary choice.

Not that we bought them. We used the library. Ours was housed in a leftover WW2 Nissen hut (the British version of a Quonset hut) which sat on a bombed-out lot behind a church. It had a low door and a unique warm, musty, dusty smell, which I think came partly from the worn floorboards and partly from the books themselves, of which there were not very many. I finished with the children's picture books by the time I was four, and had read all the chapter books by the time I was eight, and had read all the grown-up books by the time I was ten.

Not that I was unique - or even very bookish. I was one of the rough kids. We fought and stole and broke windows and walked miles to soccer games, where we fought some more. We were covered in scabs and scars. We had knives in our pockets - but we had books in our pockets too. Even the kids who couldn't read tried very hard to, because we all sensed there was more to life than the gray, pinched, post-war horizons seemed to offer. Traveling farther than we could walk in half a day was out of the question - but we could travel in our heads ... to Australia, Africa, America ... by sea, by air, on horseback, in helicopters, in submarines. Meeting people unlike ourselves was very rare ... but we could meet them on the page. For most of us, reading - and imagining, and dreaming - was as useful as breathing.

My parents were decent, dutiful people, and when my mother realized I had read everything the Nissen hut had to offer - most of it twice - she got me a library card for a bigger place the other side of the canal. I would head over there on a Friday afternoon after school and load up with the maximum allowed - six titles - which would make life bearable and get me through the week. Just. Which sounds ungrateful - my parents were doing their best, no question, but lively, energetic kids needed more than that time and place could offer. Once a year we went and spent a week in a trailer near the sea - no better or worse a vacation than anyone else got, for sure, but usually accompanied by lashing rain and biting cold and absolutely nothing to do.

The only thing that got me through one such week was Von Ryan's Express by David Westheimer. I loved that book. It was a WW2 prisoner-of-war story full of tension and suspense and twists and turns, but its biggest "reveal" was moral rather than physical - what at first looked like collaboration with the enemy turned out to be resistance and escape. I read it over and over that week and never forgot it.

Then almost forty years later, when my own writing career was picking up a head of steam, I got a fan letter signed by a David Westheimer. The handwriting was shaky, as if the guy was old. I wondered, could it be? I wrote back and asked, are you the David Westheimer? Turned out yes, it was. We started a correspondence that lasted until he died. I met him in person at a book signing I did in California, near his home, which gave me a chance to tell him how he had kept me sane in a rain-lashed trailer all those years ago. He said he had had the same kind of experience forty years before that. Now I look forward to writing a fan letter to a new author years from now ... and maybe hearing my books had once meant something special to him or her. Because that's what books do - they dig deeper, they mean more, they stick around forever.

From the Publisher

"Reacher is a modern-day Shane.... [and Lee Child] is known as the master of the plot twist."—Daily News (NY)

The novels of Lee Child are:

“Spectacular.” —Seattle Times

“Terrific…swift and brutal.” —The New York Times

“What a page-turner should be.” —Michael Connelly

“Bang-on suspense.” —Houston Chronicle

“The best-written, best-plotted, best in just about every way...” —Boston Globe

Entertainment Weekly

the story is...as tightly wound as Reacher himself

The Los Angeles Times

The publisher's blurb describes Lee Child as the best thriller writer you might not yet be reading, and for once a blurb speaks true. Child deserves to be galloped through because his writing is exuberant, ebullient and exciting. Persuader's hero, Jack Reacher, is resolute, ruthless, sure-footed and moral the way Raymond Chandler's Marlowe was moral — indifferent to laws and to what we whimsically call justice, interested only in doing the right thing. The right thing turns out to involve destruction and slaughter on a grand scale, but that's all right, because the villains deserve to be rubbed out with extreme prejudice, and they usually are. — Eugen Weber

Publishers Weekly

The promo copy on the ARC of Child's new thriller proclaims, "We dare to make this claim: Lee Child is the best thriller writer you're probably not reading-yet." Hopefully the "six-figure" marketing campaign promised by Child's new publisher will make that statement obsolete, because readers will be hard-pressed to find a more engaging thriller this spring season. Child is a master of storytelling skills, not least the plot twist, and the opening chapter of this novel spins a doozy, as a high-octane, extremely violent action sequence sees Child hero Jack Reacher rescue a young man, 20-year-old Richard Beck, from an attempted kidnapping before the rug is pulled out from under the reader with the chapter's last line. The rest of the novel centers on the Beck family's isolated, heavily guarded estate on the Maine coast where Reacher takes Richard. Richard's father is suspected by Feds of being a major drug dealer and the kidnapper of another Fed, and also seems to have ties to a fiend who killed Reacher's lady 10 years before, someone Reacher thought he'd killed in turn, in a vengeance slaying. Tension runs high, then extremely high, as Reacher, ingratiating himself with the dealer and hired on as a bodyguard, pokes around the estate, looking for the kidnapped Fed and evading and/or disposing of in-house bad guys as they begin to suspect he's not who he seems. But then little in Child's novels is as it at first seems, and numerous further plot twists spark the story line. What makes the novel really zing, though, is Reacher's narration-a unique mix of the brainy and the brutal, of strategic thinking and explosive action, moral rumination and ruthless force, marking him as one of the most memorable heroes in contemporary thrillerdom. Any thriller fan who has yet to read Lee Child should start now. (May 13) Forecast: The publisher is aiming at Father's Day sales, and with the help of a massive campaign, including print, radio and airline advertising, Child could be poised to reap the sort of sales he deserves. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Retired Army MP Jack Reacher embarks upon his seventh case when he's fingered by the FBI to infiltrate a crime syndicate and extricate a missing female undercover agent. In a breakneck first chapter that leaves the listener gasping, Jack whisks the crime boss's college-age son from an attempted kidnapping and grudgingly agrees to rush the terrified kid home to daddy. But insinuating Jack into the family compound was the goal all along-the FBI staged the kidnapping to put him undercover. Jack has 15 days to crack the case while he prowls for clues at an isolated coastal Maine estate, occasionally slipping off for an increasingly sizzling rendezvous with his sexy (female) FBI contact. An eye-for-an-eye kind of guy, Jack whittles away at an edgy entourage of murderers, molesters, and thieves like picking off steroid-plumped birds on a wire. This work is read by Dick Hill with a gritty masculinity that perfectly suits Jack. Every public library will want to add this to the other six Jack Reacher thrillers in their collections. Highly recommended.-Judith Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Surprise tops nasty surprise when former MP Jack Reacher stalks a nemesis from the past. Child (Without Fail, 2002) opens Reacher’s seventh case with an apparent ambush. As college student Richard Beck heads home, two men in a pickup cut off his limo, pull him out, and lob a grenade into the car, killing Beck’s bodyguards. Reacher, standing nearby, jumps into the fray, blows away the would-be abductors as well as a third man rushing onto the scene, who turns out to have been a plainclothes cop. The law never forgives cop killers, Reacher tells Beck, so off they flee to the student’s Maine family mansion. Then comes surprise #1: the ambush was meticulously staged by federal agents who want to plant Reacher inside the Beck fortress, where they want Reacher to rescue another agent who went missing in the same place a few weeks earlier. They also suspect that Beck’s father, a rug dealer, traffics in clandestine matters that tie him to Francis Xavier Quinn, who should have died ten years previously, when Reacher pushed him from a cliff. Quinn’s background ensues, becoming--for once!--a subplot that ratchets up suspense. Meanwhile, Reacher noses about the Beck’s latter-day Eagle’s Nest, whose depraved and degraded inhabitants have a Hitchcock flavor. Reacher also keeps dodging the estate’s security system in order to meet and make love to his operative. Back in Maine, the maid turns out to be an agent the feds know nothing of, Reacher learns (surprise #20, at least) what the Becks are up to, and he closes in on Quinn. The tension leading to Reacher and Quinn’s reunion could easily sustain a simple, two-man, High Noon–style face-off, but Child lays on and drags out the violence, the one time hisotherwise expertly judged work goes over the top. Wily plotting, swift pacing, mordant wit: Child is one skillful writer.