One Shot by
Lee Child
hbk out April 05
Published by Bantam
at £12.99
This is the ninth book in Lee Child's Jack Reacher series, a phenomenon I've
spent the last few weeks catching up on. Is it up to scratch, the fans will
immediately ask. Up there with the best, I'd say.
New readers start here. Jack Reacher is a loner with few visible means
of support who, like some 21st century Lone Ranger, moral attenae atwitch,
turns up in some American trouble spot, gets to the bottom of the mystery
(there is always a mystery, often an ingenious one), sorts out the bad guys
and leaves. There is no Tonto; he normally acquires one, usually female,
always temporary, in the course of the story. His military training (he was an
ex-military police investigator) has given him an uncanny ability to think
through clearly the problems that confront him, along with both an
encyclopaedic knowledge of guns and an expertise in their use. It also helps
that he is six feet five and weighs 250 pounds. That's the premise. Get used
to it. For once on board, you are in for one of contemporary crime fiction's
great rides.
In this one, Child, pulls off some interesting variations on the basic
formula. Unusually, for example, Reacher does not appear until Chapter Two,
45 pages in. Instead in Child's trademark pacy and economic prose , we get a
masterly scene by scene description as an unknown sniper goes about his
business (five dead) in an un-named Indiana town, and is at once expertly
investigated, the methodology patiently established, the media alerted and the
sniper located and arrested, only for him to demand exoneration from no less
than Jack Reacher.
From that point on you might imagine that nothing is as it seems. You'd
be right, but when Reacher does arrive (by bus, from Florida he is nothing if
not a democrat!), it is to implicate the sniper, not exonerate him. What follows
is a story that gives new meaning to the phrase narrative drive, a plot that
ducks and weaves in a most satisfactory way, rarely stretching credibility, and
a climactic night attack on a completely isolated out-of-town house with
Reacher armed only with a standard-issue Navy Seal survival-rescue knife.
The only disappointment is the somewhat standard-issue Russian villain, but
it's a small flaw in an otherwise excellent performance.
One Shot by
Lee Child
