Jack Reacher # 15 - Worth Dying For
A bloody, ghastly, story - perhaps the darkest of all the Reachers, and one you’d like to forget, except that it expands the paradigms of of possible evil that Jack ultimately avenges.
The Duncan family “owns” the farm country in the Dakotas in this Reacher novel - their terrible secret is that they smuggle Thai girl children and women for the sex trade, keeping one for themselves. This one is dark and truly repulsive, as Jack discovers an old barn with the remains of about 60 children, used over many years by the nasty Duncans. Jack and Dorothy, mother of one of the dead children, run down and over the Duncan family in farm trucks, satisfyingly wreaking vengeance on punishment upon the unspeakable evils committed.
The landscape is flat and revealing, cut only by highways and lonely homesteads, filled with cornfields. A drunken doctor redeems himself and a battered wife gets away.
Jack doesn’t get laid, but seeks to go to Virginia to meet a woman he met on the phone who helped him solve the mystery.
Why I love these novels:
suspense, closely worked details and specific information, strong mood/landscape metaphors, perfect American existential character creation, sardonic humour, and sadistic revenge fantasies get satisfied - Jack is truly The Grim Reaper.
Tom Cruise is going to play Reacher in an upcoming film.
This has got to be a ludicrous proposition on the face of it - JR is six-five and blonde, more like a Liam Neeson than the short, stumpy, cocky Tom Cruise we know and sort of still like because of Top Gun. JR is much more an early Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry kind of guy - what Tom will do with this task? I hope to be surprised, but it seems laughable, except to Lee Child who’ll make a lot of money for his careful years of deeply plotted suspenseful stories.
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