Jack Reacher needs no introduction. His larger-than-life, soft-hearted self once again gets into a mess by doing a good deed for a pretty lady–this one with a crutch. She gets snatched off the street by a trio of bad guys and Reacher gets snatched along with her. The first part of the story is devoted to long hot sweaty hours chained together in a dark van going somewhere, and the slow build of a sort of relationship while Reacher does his best to calculate who the kidnappers are, where they are going, and who this woman is that has made her a target.
Once they get where they’re going, it’s bad news. The trio are part of a right-wing survivalist militia from Montana, led by a huge messianic murderer named Beau. Our pretty lady, an FBI agent with high-level connections, gets locked into a special prison packed with dynamite, and Reacher gets marched to the firing squad. But before anything too bad can happen—aside from all the gruesome Beau murders that have already taken place and will continue to take place—our hero manages to get him some wiggle room, which is all Jack Reacher ever needs to save the day. Several times, in fact!
The silly action and even sillier dead-end romance that follows is all par for the course in a Lee Child “Reacher” novel, but what saves this one is the theme—the frightening spread of militia survivalist groups all over the United States, and the challenge they pose to centralized government. Whatever their gripes may be, they are “loose cannons” that combine fanatic elements with criminal elements and are, frankly, terrifying. The fictional exaggerations notwithstanding, Child brings this phenomenon to our attention and that’s all to the good.
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