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Intuition, guts save the day
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Published: November 8, 2009
GONE TOMORROW. By Lee Child. Delacorte Press. 421 pages. $27.
In his 13th Jack Reacher novel, Lee Child starts at a peak that few writers achieve by the completion of their plot. Riding on a late-night No. 6 train in New York City, Reacher, a former U.S. Army Military Police officer, spots a woman who looks like a terrorist bomber. His confrontation with her turns deadly and turns loose a series of events that spins Reacher through the streets of New York, into the corridors of power in Washington, and even into the corridors of the O. Henry Hotel in Greensboro.
There he meets with John Samson, a North Carolina congressman, presidential candidate and former covert operative in the Afghanistan war that Russia bungled. The woman in the subway car had something that Samson knows about, and everyone wants it. Everyone includes guys in bad suits, bad guys from other countries, bad guys from our country and one beautiful bad girl who heads up the offensive against Jack. Everyone has bad feelings toward him, and everyone gives him bad information.
That's all right, however. Like many other writers, Child can twist a plot and make us turn the pages. But few writers can take us through the intricate process of intuitive deduction that Reacher runs through on his way to a solution. "Look, don't see, listen, don't hear," is his mantra as he winds his way through information he has collected by the middle of the book.
By the end of the book, he is the only one who knows where the information is. Subsequently, everyone wants him. At the final confrontation, Child puts Reacher up against 17 adversaries with only 30 rounds of ammunition in his gun -- right where the reader wants him.
In a series as successful as this one, the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Once again, however, Child demonstrates that the best mystery draws us in with how things happen, not what happens. Terrorist tendencies, subway car trivia, Magnum "flinch," and "sidewalk smells … rising up all around, like a crude calendar," are just some of the fascinating details that fall out of the rapidly turning pages of what is arguably the best Jack Reacher novel yet.
Robert Moyer is retired from teaching drama at the UNC School of the Arts.
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