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James Grant has been writing the adventures of Jack Reacher since 1997 and as he's come into his mid-60s he's been wanting to take a break and retire from that work. So he talked with his younger brother Andrew Grant, himself the author of a few adventure thrillers, to see about first partnering and then taking over the series. The logistical issue comes in the names involved -- James Grant writes as Lee Child and Andrew Grant under his own name. So Andrew Grant became Andrew Child for the purposes of the Reacher series, and their first collaboration hit bookshelves a few weeks ago under both of their names: The Sentinel.

Reacher's traveling through a small Tennessee town when he spots a man about to be ambushed by some thugs. Despite his lack of permanent ties he's not in favor of that sort of thing so he stops the attack -- emphatically. After the thugs make their escape -- some less conscious than others -- Reacher learns that he's saved a man nobody in town likes much at all. Rusty Rutherford was the town's information technology manager and a ransomware attack has locked up all of the town's information. Although he'd been warning them about the security breach, the town government and the rest of the citizens would rather blame Rusty than blame themselves and he's the town's most hated guy. He's trying to prove his innocence but doesn't know why anyone would try to kidnap him, which intrigues Reacher enough that he starts digging into the matter while hanging around to watch Rusty's back. The whole mess turns out to involve Russian cyber-warfare, sleeper agents, neo-Nazis and some good old-fashioned murder. All Rusty has is Reacher. Anyone who's read any of the previous 24 books has a pretty good idea how that is likely to turn out.

The younger Child brings pluses and minuses to his first outing with the iconic hero. On the plus side he offers some of liveliness the series had in its first ten years or so. Never chatty, Reacher had grown more taciturn and misanthropic and made recent books something of a drudge to move through. On the minus side he doesn't have his brother's economy with words and comes across as more of a Reacher pastiche than an actual Reacher adventure. That may settle out as he moves forward.

Sentinel's plot is more than a little outlandish once all of the layers of the onion are peeled back, but that's not exactly foreign to the series. As the series creator James Grant is more than entitled to continue it in whatever manner he wishes and he's also entitled to think his brother is the best choice to do that. Over the next couple of books, if we see Andrew Grant write more and more like Andrew Child then Reacher may become both more recognizable and more interesting.

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We observe Harry Bosch, Michael Connelly's main character, from outside of his head -- the Bosch books are in third person and although there is some interior narration it doesn't often hit a level of deep introspection. Usually the introspection has been left to the first-person books featuring lawyer Mickey Haller, Harry's half-brother, and lately detective Renee Ballard. The Law of Innocence continues that trend, diving even deeper into Mickey's heart and mind as he finds himself defending the one client he can't afford to let down: Himself.

A fishy traffic stop leads to the discovery of a body in the trunk of the Lincoln Lawyer's eponymous ride, and judges and prosecutors who have lost out to Mickey in the past are not predisposed to cut him any breaks. Mickey knows he's not guilty and the people who know him best agree. He's pretty certain he'll be able to get a "not guilty" verdict but he knows that won't be enough: If he wants to continue his life as a lawyer he'll need to prove himself actually innocent and the only way to do that is to find the person who really killed his former client. But clearing that extra hurdle won't be as easy and he has a greater chance to end up on the wrong end of the jury's decision.

As mentioned above, interior dialogue and introspection have been a feature of the Haller books, as we learn about Mickey's character when he explains how lawyers do things during a trial and how he approaches them. Those observations are sharpened by his predicament and when he finally confronts the reality that he may not be able to expose the falsehoods marshaled against him we see further inside Mickey's head and heart than in any earlier book. Innocence has some flaws -- some characters leave the stage in a rather perfunctory fashion and wind up rendering their part of the story far more superfluous than is good for the overall story. The eventual resolution of the case seems to sputter more than detonate and robs the story of a potentially powerful element as it closes out. A little more time and energy spent in either or both of these areas would move Innocence into clear four or even five-star territory but even thus limited it's a reminder of why people who like compelling and thoughtful legal and police procedurals wait for Connelly's next book.