'One Shot' by Lee Child
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He's a bad dude, this Jack Reacher, a cold-blooded killer in the vein of loners like Yojimbo and that nameless guy inspired by the Japanese film played by Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti Westerns of the 1970s.
By Lee Child
Delacorte. ($25)
An ex-Army police officer in the first Gulf War, Reacher now moves anonymously around the country with no address, no bank account and, most alarmingly, a one-day supply of underwear. Talk about traveling light.
There's not much subtlety in Lee Child's creation, the star of eight previous bloody thrillers who pulverizes the villains because they deserve it. They're also trying to damage him, but with little success. He's too strong, too quick and too smart.
In the current installment, Reacher's entertaining a Norwegian dancer in Miami Beach when he learns from the TV news that a killer out of his past has struck again.
Since he promised to make the man's life miserable if he resumed his murderous ways, Reacher boards the Greyhound to seek him out.
James Barr is the unlucky recipient of Reacher's attention after he's arrested for the seemingly random sniper shooting of five passers-by as they were leaving work in a nameless Indiana city.
All the clues point right at Barr. In fact, the evidence is so perfect, it smacks of a setup. Barr, unfortunately, has been smacked around in jail and is hospitalized with amnesia.
Before he was beaten, though, he denied his crime and asked for Reacher but gave no explanation. Even our hero is baffled because he knows Barr has done the random-sniper thing before as a G.I. in Kuwait City in 1991.
Since disclosing the crime would open up unsavory business in Kuwait, the Army covered it up and honorably discharged Barr -- with Reacher's threat.
Helped by the suspect's sister, a young lawyer, an ambitious TV news reporter and an ex-Marine, Reacher arrives at a different conclusion than the cops, and it points to a tribe of nasty Russian hoods inhabiting a farmhouse with high-tech detection gear. Before the bodies and bullets start flying, Reacher rekindles a fling with a Desert Storm girlfriend who's now an Army general and does buy another pair of shorts.
While his hero is at best a two-dimensional sort and he recruits his villains from Central Casting, Child is a clever plotter with a novelist's sense of place and detail. He does keep your attention, the top priority for a quick-reading crime novel.
First Published June 19, 2005 12:00 am
