Those are two fictional towns in Colorado, and in Lee Child's 2008 Reacher novel Nothing to Lose, our wandering hero passes through the first only to find himself being harassed and thrown out of the second. Such treatment doesn't sit well with Reacher, a former Army major in the military police, and he makes it his business to find out what's going on in Despair that made its residents so eager to remove him.
Along the way Reacher enlists the aid of a pretty Hope police officer and finds the mystery deepen when women arrive in Hope wondering about men who've gone missing in Despair. What role does the metal recycling plant, run by the millionaire minister who more or less owns Despair, play? What are the strange nighttime airplane landings, and why is there a military guard on the road leading into Despair from the other side?
Naturally, in order to learn the answer to these questions, Reacher will have to throw some punches, sneak around and get the pretty Hope PD officer in bed at least once. Child hasn't varied his formula overmuch since introducing Reacher in The Killing Floor in 1997. Here he varies it even less. Reacher has crossed paths with modern feudal barons like Nothing's Thurman several times (Die Trying, Echo Burning). He's crossed rich men drunk with power before (nearly every novel). And so on.
Two books out of 12 may not be a trend, but the two most recent Reacher adventures have been about as lazily done a pair of books that Child has put together. Remember the numbers kick and math quirk that Reacher had that played such a big part in Bad Luck and Trouble? No worries if you don't. Because it never shows up in Nothing, since it doesn't have any role to play in the plot. Nothing turns on Reacher's stubbornness about going back where he's been; had the Despair cops who ran him out of town headed in the direction he'd been going, he would have just moved on peacefully.
Characters often develop over a series of books; especially when we're talking about a dozen books spread over a dozen years. But Reacher's character arc makes him more and more of a jerk and less and less likable. Throw in Child's hilariously unsubtle anti-Iraq war and presidential campaign speech and his shoddy Biblical scholarship (Lee, here's a hint: The New Testament wasn't written in Hebrew), and you've got a book that should worry Reacher fans. We can hope 2009's Gone Tomorrow shucks its unlucky number and begins an upswing that takes the series back to earlier levels.
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