For the thrill of it

Lead review

We all know that our Bollywood heroes are superhuman. They’ll get attacked by a dozen men, chased by cars and airplanes, captured by evil dons, and still will somehow win every time. But Jack Reacher, the hero of Lee Child’s Make Me, goes 19 times better. Reacher has done all of the above in the previous 19 books, and survived mostly unhurt to tell the tale. Now he’s back for the 20th time in Make Me.

Reacher has the build of Schwarzenegger, the moves of Bruce Lee, and the brains of a Sherlock Holmes. He also has no real home or family attachments, so he travels idly from one place to the next throughout the United States, righting wrongs and delivering his own brand of justice.

In this book, he wanders into a completely unknown town — the strangely named Mother’s Rest — just to satisfy his curiosity. Why is the town named so? Was it a memorial site for a young mother dying early on a westward trail, or the last homestead of an early settler? As he asks around, and wanders around, looking for a monument or memorial to the ‘mother’, he stirs the suspicion of a shadowy group of people in the town. The group is already watching a private investigator, Michelle Chang, who has been in the town for a few days. Reacher and Chang meet up and chat, leading the group to think they are working together. Of course, this suspicion turns true when Reacher observes — of all things — a suspicious handshake, and decides to help Chang out.

Chang’s colleague, Keever, had called her to Mother’s Rest to help him out. A case he was working on, initially assumed to be trivial, suddenly needed more people, and she came in on the first train. Trouble is, Keever has disappeared. Unlike Chang, we the readers already know he’s dead — it’s mentioned in the first scene. And Chang has no idea what he was working on — not even who the client was. There is only a bookmarked page in a magazine, and a scrawled note about “200 deaths” in a dustbin.

But Jack Reacher is on the scene. Slowly, he pieces together the story, seemingly out of thin air. The first task is, of course, finding out who Keever’s client was. This turns out to be unexpectedly difficult to find out. The magazine bookmark leads them to a reporter who might be connected to the case. Then suddenly, things get worse. A Russian hitman is now involved, and Reacher and Chang are his targets. What sort of secret, held by a bunch of small-town folks from a small town, would justify an underworld gang to protect it?

Who else but Reacher could tackle drug dealers, Russian kingpins, and armed robbers, with barely a scratch received? (Well, one strong blow to the head, but that’s pretty small compared to the damage he dishes out.) With characteristic élan and power, he digs, and digs, and digs, until he gets to the final awful truth of Mother’s Rest. We always knew he would. He’s done it many times before. And then he comes up with a plan involving a half-dozen vehicles and split-second timing, in order to bring the wrongdoers to justice. Which plan, of course, goes through implausibly well.

It is increasingly difficult to swallow Reacher’s invincibility if one considers the stories to all be happening in the same universe. Why does Reacher never get bothered by the law after he attacks, handicaps, or even murders wrongdoers? Not so much as a summons or an investigating detective trying to get the complete story. It’s almost like comic-book superhero stories where entire buildings and blocks are destroyed in every issue, but the skyline remains pretty much the same. As long as you’re willing to buy into the vision of Reacher’s world, you’ll enjoy it. Don’t expect it to be reality. Just like Bollywood movies.

But of course, all these thoughts and critical analysis come up after you’ve finished the book itself. Child’s clear, clipped prose conveys the atmosphere perfectly, and the story keeps moving, grabbing you by the lapels and dragging you with it. You’re happy to lose yourself, always knowing that Reacher’s victory is inevitable. Just don’t read too many of the books in the series, together, or it might get monotonous.

Is Make Me the best place to start reading Child? Well, it’s better than a few others, but probably not the best of the lot. Child makes it a point to not have too many references to earlier plots, so the reader can join in at any point. If you’re looking for a good airport/train read, this is as good as it gets.

Make Me
Lee Child
Bantam Press
2015, pp 432, Rs 259