Bad Title?

I haven't book-blogged in awhile, so let's take a look at Lee Child's latest paperback adventure of adventurer Jack Reacher.

Child has been writing about Reacher, an ex-U.S. Army investigator who now wanders around the country, since 1997. Bad Luck and Trouble is the 11th Reacher novel, and maybe giving it that title proved a bit of bad luck in itself. After a nomadic lifetime as an Army brat and then a serving officer himself, Reacher doesn't stay anywhere longer than a night or two. He has a folding toothbrush, an passport for ID (a post-9/11 innovation) and the shirt on his back, which he wears for a few days and then tosses into the trash in whatever thrift store he bought a new one at.

In that sense, the Reacher books have always required a little suspension of disbelief. But by making Reacher the ultimate gypsy, Child can make sure he's always the unknown stranger and offer a new femme fatale in each volume. And Child's precision, fast-paced writing moves the story along well enough this kind of "Yeah, sure" feature doesn't slow things down.

But Bad Luck is, for whatever reason, Child being lazy, and it shows. The story centers on Reacher and former colleagues from his special Army investigations unit, several of whom have gone missing. The others try to learn what happened to them while protecting themselves from whatever enemy they now face. Child built his cast too large, leaving several characters with little to do but be interchangeable offscreen plot devices. A little work could have merged some of these and reduced the clutter considerably.

In Bad Luck, Reacher is shown as a numbers buff, playing around regularly with numerical patterns and codes and able to work some fairly complex math in his head. He's never displayed such abilities or habits before, but since they come in useful at several crucial plot points in this book, we may guess why he does so now.

Fans of straight-ahead soldier-of-fortune style adventuring, well-written and with some seriously stylish storytelling should have a fine old time with Lee Child and Jack Reacher. But they'd be advised to check out the first ten books, skip no. 11 and wait to see what no. 12, Nothing to Lose, has to offer.