Child has turned away from formulaic high-jinks to explore his characters instead: The result? His best so far.
The eighth Jack Reacher tale (Persuader, 2003, etc.) is a fabulously suspenseful prequel that reveals Reacher’s character as he uncovers a homicidal cabal of military officers.
On New Year’s Eve 1990, Military Police Major Jack Reacher gets a call: a general is dead, evidently of a heart attack while having sex in a seedy motel near an isolated North Carolina Army base. The general and three subordinates had just arrived in the US from Germany and were en route to Fort Irwin, California. Why did the general take a 289-mile detour for a sleazy fling? Reacher crosses the road to a strip joint where he searches for the prostitute whose favors brought on the heart attack. After noticing other soldiers in the club, Reacher avenges a battered prostitute by beating up the joint’s owner. Back at the base, Reacher gets another call: the general’s wife has been bludgeoned to death during an apparent burglary of their Virginia home. Reacher teams up with Lieutenant Summer, an attractive, coolly competent black female MP, but finds few clues at the scene. Soon after, the hideously mutilated body of a Special Forces soldier whom Reacher saw at the strip joint is found. Not only had this soldier signed a complaint against Reacher about the fight at the club, but also his fatal injuries could have been inflicted only by a man of Reacher’s strength and height. The Special Forces think Reacher killed him and have marked him for death. Then, suspense at its peak, Child takes Reacher and his brother Joe to Paris to visit their dying mother. Child merely touches on the mother-son relationship that has had so much to do with the rootless, brooding action hero Reacher has become. Then it’s back to the action: another corpse, and uneasy undercurrents in Army bureaucracy that tell Reacher the post-USSR peace dividend will be anything but.
Child has turned away from formulaic high-jinks to explore his characters instead: The result? His best so far.Pub Date: May 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-33667-5
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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