Book Review : No Plan B By Lee and Andrew Child

The Jack Reacher books are and I'm not exaggerating, the reason this blog exists. I randomly picked up A Wanted Man back in 2013(Holy crap that was 10 years ago) as a holiday read and that was it. I spent the next year buying the other 16 or so books in charity shops ( I was a skint unemployed IT student back then) until I'd done the lot. I'd never done that before and haven't done it since. Jack Reacher got me back into reading. 

Which is why I was a bit gutted when in 2020 Lee child had decided he'd had enough and wasn't going to write anymore. Bugger. Except it wasn't the end, like James Bond Jack reacher returned, with a big difference. Lee found himself a co writer, his younger brother and fellow author Andrew. The idea was that they'd write 3 or 4 together and then Andrew would fly solo. No plan B is the 3rd out of the 4, following the sentinel and better off dead.

Plot. (copied from amazon partly from laziness and partly because I don't want to spoil it for newbies or those of you who haven't got to it yet) 

Gerrardsville, Colorado. One tragic event. Two witnesses. Two conflicting accounts. One witness sees a woman throw herself in front of a bus - clearly suicide. The other witness is Jack Reacher. And he sees what really happened - a man in grey hoodie and jeans, swift and silent as a shadow, pushing the victim to her death, before grabbing her bag and sauntering away.

Reacher follows the killer, not knowing that this was no random act of violence. It is part of something much bigger...a sinister, secret conspiracy, with powerful people on the take, enmeshed in an elaborate plot that leaves no room for error. If any step is compromised, the threat will have to be quickly and permanently removed. 

Sounds like a classic Reacher escapade to me and I have good news. Classic Reacher is back. Its everything reacher should be intriguing, violent, surprising, touching in places and I'm pleased to say VERY funny. The villains are absolute bastards, just wait until you see what they get up to with napalm. And reacher deals with them as only he can. As violently as humanly possible, without it reading like a John Wick screenplay. 

The sentinel and better off dead perhaps unsurprisingly felt like Andrew was still getting his eye in and if you examined them closely enough you can probably have a decent guess at who wrote which bits. No plan B though. This feels like it was almost all Andrew writing and if he can  carry on like this and up the anti every time then reacher's future is very bright indeed.

Verdict 

Cracker.