‘Lose’ a thriller you won’t be able to put down
“Nothing to Lose”
by Lee Child (Delacorte, 416 pages, $27)
Jack Reacher – former military cop, covert specialist, intelligent tough guy with big hands, a big frame and minimalist philosophies – has always been an archetypical lone wolf.
And so it’s fitting that in his latest adventure, we find him zipping back and forth between Hope and Despair.
These towns lie in eastern Colorado, where the Rocky Mountains register only as an enticing mirage. Hope is a cozy enough enclave with an accommodating female cop and an all-night diner that serves decent coffee in a cup that’s not quite the right size.
Reacher, his only agenda to keep traveling west, notices such details, though he’s more than content to go with the flow, as long as nobody challenges him: “I don’t like to be told where I can go and where I can’t.”
Despair, though, thrives on telling you where you can go and where you can’t. It’s an ugly little company town where Reacher is immediately surrounded by four deputies – one of whom he dispatches with a swift right to the jaw – and arrested for vagrancy, then dumped over the city limits.
Anybody with a passing acquaintance of Reacher knows that banishment will pique his interest in why the townies want to keep out strangers so badly. But that question is merely one of the intriguing mysteries in the slam-bang “Nothing to Lose,” Lee Child’s compulsively readable 12th novel.
There are more oddities ahead: The body of a young man over which Reacher stumbles in the dark and which subsequently disappears; the young women who drift into Hope, waiting for – what?; the metal-recycling plant with security befitting a top-secret Army installation.
Then there’s the smug plant owner, who’s also the town preacher. He owns all of Despair and preaches an “end of days” philosophy to his congregation.
Child throws in a few geographical hurdles – it might help to consult a map of eastern Colorado as Reacher travels around the area – but “Nothing to Lose” only slows down a couple of times, always for reasons that deepen the weight of the story.
Most suspense novelists can only dream of keeping up the relentless pace at which Child does his best work. “Nothing to Lose” follows his recent trend of writing novels – “Bad Luck and Trouble,” “The Hard Way,” “One Shot” – that confidently speed forward with smartly plotted storylines, explosive and satisfying finales and some of the best action sequences in the business.
At the stage of his career when many other suspense writers fumble for new ideas or settle on ho-hum, repetitive storylines, Child still cranks out thrillers that you simply can’t put down.
Bring on lucky No. 13.