No Plan B: The unputdownable new 2022 Jack Reacher thriller from the No.1 bestselling authors (Jack Reacher, 27)

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This perception was not helped by a lacklustre narration by Scott Brick, usually one of my favourite interpreters and readers in the genre. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

There were six men in the room, and this was the third covert meeting they’d held there in the last week. Together this nest of rooms formed the command hub of Unit S2 at the Minerva Correctional Facility in Winson, Mississippi.

Along the way, we are introduced to not one interesting character and forced to plow through page after page of eye-glazing, brain-numbing descriptions of how Reacher goes about accomplishing his tasks. In some ways, it’s lacking in the nuance of the telling that the straight Lee Child authored books has, but it managed to keep me entertained and curious about what would happen next. There's a guy who wants revenge, another looking for a long-lost someone, some very bad guys who don't want to get caught doing what they're doing and, of course, the raison d'etre that puts Reacher, at first inadvertently and then intentionally, in the middle of the whole mess. I'd have much preferred a much slower and more considered approach to the entire story, focussing, as in the past, on the arrival, the fatal character flaws of the antagonists, a more subtle reveal of the real intentions behind the Minerva Corporation and just generally a story more redolent of how a drifter like Reacher would have approached it. As always, my sincere thanks to Lee and Andrew Child, Delacorte Press, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of No Plan B!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t come until the very end, by which time Reacher has engaged in more than his share of brutal violence--including a killing that is exceedingly grotesque. I have followed the Jack Reacher series since its inception, which is why I was a tad leery when Lee Child invited his brother to collaborate. It’s a dark, horrifying crime that may be difficult to come to terms with and if more was revealed about it, I may have been more convinced about Reacher’s actions when he reached Winson. Lee has three homes—an apartment in Manhattan, a country house in the south of France, and whatever airplane cabin he happens to be in while traveling between the two. An accomplice intervenes, allowing both to escape, as Reacher has an unfortunate encounter with a collapsing fire escape.The trip through cell block C was completely pointless and clunky way to tie off a number of obvious loose ends. During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker.

The evil corporate conspiracy trope has become cliche--variations of it have become too common in the series. There’s a crime sitting behind all of the mystery at the center of this book, but it’s really only presented as an aside with very little substance provided. Reacher pursues the man into an alley, confronts him in his usual unabashed manner, easily takes his gun away, spins him around and forcefully pushes him into the adjacent alley wall with resultant broken nose and freely flowing blood from multiple gashes.He is the recipient of many awards, most recently Author of the Year at the 2019 British Book Awards. Things do get very involved and the reader needs to concentrate more than is usually required in a Jack Reacher book. Lee Child was born October 29th, 1954 in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham.

From the start we are presented with three separate narrative threads: a group of bigwigs at a Correctional Facility (euphemism for “prison”) in Mississippi planning for a major event the following Friday; in Colorado, Jack Reacher is the sole witness to the murder of a woman as she is pushed under a bus; teenager Jed Starmer prepares to leave his unhappy foster home in Los Angeles and make the perilous journey across the country to, hopefully, meet his biological father. Connecting with Hannah Hampton, she and Reacher headed to Winson, halfway across the country, where they hoped to find answers. It is said one of his novels featuring his hero Jack Reacher is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds. The plot has four "legs," if you will - and that made it a little tough for me to follow, at least for the first half or so of the book, just because of the number of characters and switchbacks from one to the other.

Although, so far, the co-written novels in this long-running series haven’t matched up to many of the earlier ones, in No Plan B there are signs that there could be life left in the series yet. As always, it’s Jack’s determination and singlemindedness of purpose that is compelling just as much as the action. As he did so successfully in Past Tense, the author weaves several narrative threads, only one of which tracks Reacher himself. Reacher follows the killer on foot, not knowing that he is part of something much bigger and far-reaching . A foster kid in Los Angeles suddenly decides to up and leave his foster home, catching a bus heading east.