Personal: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child

Personal is Lee Child’s 19^th Jack Reacher novel and may be his best yet.  In it, Reacher takes on two foes superior to him at two of his most competent skills, long range sniper shooting and street fighting.

A sniper has taken a long range shot at the president of France in Paris.  So long range that the list of suspects can be narrowed to three- an American, a Brit and a Russian.  The American, John Kott was recently released from a 15 year stint in prison.  Reacher put him there.  So, Reacher is called out of retirement to find Kott and put him away... again.

Reacher is teamed with a young female CIA operative, Casey Nice and they are flown to Kott’s home in rural Arkansas.  There they find evidence that Kott has been practicing his skill from fourteen hundred yards but the sniper is long gone.

The next stop is Paris where Reacher meets his British and Russian counterparts to study the scene of the crime.  The spot where the rifle was fired is exactly fourteen hundred yards from where the French president was standing.  Only a bullet proof shield saved him.  While the three investigators are lined up in a row examining the sniper’s shooting post, the Russian’s head explodes, taken down by a sniper from over a thousand yards away.  Reacher surmises the bullet was a miss clearly aimed at him not the Russian.  Now he is certain Kott is the shooter and knows it’s personal.

The next scheduled public appearance of the French president is at the G8 in London in a few days… obviously all the G8 leaders will be there.  So Reacher and Ms. Nice are off to London where they are escorted by an MI6 (British CIA) operative named Bennett.  MI5 (British FBI) has narrowed the likely location of the sniper to two London gangs, one is local (Romford Boys) and the other is Serbian.  Reacher quickly deduces Kott is staying with the Romford Boys’ leader and is not planning to fire on the G8 summit… he’s laying a trap for Reacher.  The gang’s leader and enforcer is Little Joey… six eleven, over three hundred pounds, and built for fighting.  So Reacher must more or less single handedly, take down this Goliath in order to subjugate his sniper foe.  In doing so, he hopes to find out who really is behind this flurry of violence.

Personal is Lee Child at his personal best.  He uses his iconic protagonist Jack Reacher to fascinate us.  Reacher is an off the grid avenging drifter made irresistible by his self-proclaimed sense of justice and selfless courageous defense of the defenseless… no police, judge or jury necessary.  We are intrigued how he can calmly and quickly, size up his foe making split second but precise assessments that inevitably stack the deck in his favor.  After nineteen installments, these Jack Reacher stories just never get old.  Child is a master of this genre. 

Black Flagged by Steven Konkoly

On a typical summer night up and down the east coast, eight prominent Muslims living in the US are murdered. Mostly businessmen. Within about an hour, the FBI’s Taskforce HYDRA no longer has anyone to watch. This taskforce had been working for a couple years doing the painstaking work of tracking the flow of Muslim money from the US being laundered and funneled into Al Qaeda. And these 8 victims were suspected of being the traffickers of millions. The quiet life in the greater Portland, Maine area is about to come to an abrupt halt for financial analyst Daniel Petrovich and his wife Jessica.

General Terrence Sanderson, US Army (ret.) used to run an off the books outfit for the Pentagon called Black Flag. That’s the term spy agencies use to identify bad guys targeted for execution. And his unit was good, really good. They’d taken out leaders of organizations unfriendly to the US all over the world, most recently in the former Yugoslavia. Problem in that some do-gooder found out about Black Flag and informed Congress. To avoid the publicity, Black Flag was shut down, Sanderson retired under suspicious circumstances and the operatives mostly tried to go home and live ordinary lives. Problem is that most had done some pretty bad things using some even worse methods.

Daniel gets a call from Sanderson. One job. Quick. Local. Then come down to DC for a meet. Daniel knows that if he does the job, he’ll have to go completely off the grid and that includes leaving Jessica, which he isn’t happy about. Not one bit.

As Daniel heads to DC, some adroit detective work by both the FBI and the CIA have tracked Daniel to Baltimore and start to close the net around him. But old skills die hard and Daniel escapes multiple attempts at his capture eventually meeting the reclusive Sanderson who has a proposition.

Consider this book to be the back story to a series of books about Black Flag by Konkoly. And if the next ones are a slickly presented as this one, it should be one helluva ride. This would’ve been another one sitting book if life hadn’t interfered. The story jumps quickly and smoothly between the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon in DC to Baltimore, West Virginia, Connecticut, Boston, and Maine as the chase accelerates and the noose tightens, but never quite catches Daniel. Some of the strings pulled by Sanderson might be a bit hard to fathom, but as Johnny Carson used to say about some of his rapidly failing bits, “buy the premise, buy the bit.” And if you buy the premise, the payoff comes in the numerous reveals as the author ties up the story. This is my first book by Konkoly, which is surprising considering the body of work he’s published is right up my alley, especially a series he has on what can only be considered as being about apocalyptic preppers. That sounds interesting too. The guy’s got about a dozen novels, novellas, and singles and the idiots who manage purchasing at my county library have seen fit to buy not a single title. Aggravating, indeed. I’ll find more. Count on it.

ECD

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Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg

Smilla’s Sense of Snow is Danish author Peter Hoeg’s third novel, written in 1992. This was made into a thriller movie in 1997 with Julia Ormond in the lead role of Smilla Jasperson. Did you know that Greenland, originally a colony of Demark, is now an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark? I didn’t either. The natives of Greenland, Inuits, have lived in this inhospitable climate since the 13^th century. As a result of Denmark’s involvement, many Inuits have migrated to Denmark where there are not looked on favorably as very rural people in the U.S. have some trouble assimilating into big city life. The story is interesting in it’s exploration of the societies in Denmark and Greenland, about which I knew so little.

This is a murder mystery that begins with the unexplained death of 6-year-old Isaiah, a kid who was terrified of heights, who jumped to his death from the roof of his apartment building. Isaiah’s mother, a full Inuit, was a drunk, and it was not unusual for the child to be left alone. The author wrote, “They say that people drink a lot in Greenland. That is a totally absurd understatement. People drink a colossal amount.” Smilla, who was half Inuit and had moved to Copenhagen at the age of 7 when her mother died, did not buy that this was a suicide, but the police were uninterested in pursuing this matter. With no standing as an investigator, Smilla stirred up trouble with people who wanted to keep the reason for Isaiah’s death a secret. The investigation took her into secret corporate files and an investigation into Danish expeditions that had occurred in Greenland.

I was past the 50% mark of this book when I chose not to read it further. The story line, at least for me, just bogged down and I lost interest. I found myself not being so interested in Smilla’s character and those characters with whom she interacted. Still, the premise of this book is a good one.

To Buy Smilla's Sense of Snow on Amazon, click here

Turning Angel by Greg Iles

Using the murder of Kate Townsend as the centerpiece of this story, although there is actually more than one murder that occurs, Greg Iles boldly wades into typically forbidden territory – the sexual attraction between high school girls and older men. Kate was one of those beautiful and talented high school seniors who was headed to Harvard, “the start of the senior class,” but she also had a dark side. She had pursued a sexual encounter with the famous and handsome local doctor, Drew Elliott, who was most unhappy in his marriage. Who was really responsible for the seduction? Iles handles that matter with sensitivity and skill by using his protagonist, Penn Cage, as the counterpoint to Drew. Of course, after Kate’s death and the news of her relationship with Drew and her pregnancy, it is Drew who is accused of the murder. Did he really kill her when he found out about her dark side?

Iles leads us into the drug culture in the South. He takes us through the startlingly different world that faces high school students today. He notes the freedom and information that high school kids now have compared to what was experienced by those of us who are a bit older. Some of us fought for those freedoms and now watch our children struggle to manage them. Iles writes of the dilemma by having a high school student, Mia Burke, who was an integral part of the story, deliver her graduation valedictorian’s speech:

“Don’t get me wrong, I like freedom. But you can have too much of a good thing. At some point you have to draw a line, agree on some rules, or all you have is chaos. Anarchy. So I guess what I’m saying tonight is this: That’s our job, guys. Our class, I mean. And our generation. To figure out where freedom stops being a blessing and starts being a curse. Our parents can’t do it. They don’t even understand the world we live in now. Maybe that job can’t even be done for a society. Maybe it’s an individual decision in every case. But it seems to me that humans given absolute freedom don’t do a very good  job of choosing limits.”

Turning Angel is the third Penn Cage novel by Greg Iles that I’ve read, and I’ve already acquired his next, Natchez Burning. You can see that I’m impressed with these murder mysteries. His character development, plot and subplots are excellent. So far, there are six books in the Penn Cage Series, and Iles has written a number of other books that I’ll probably get to. No doubt, Iles belongs in my power rotation of authors, no matter who he might crowd out of my top ten authors.


Buy Turning Angel: A Novel (A Penn Cage Novel) on Amazon!

Cavalry Man: The Killing Machine by Ed Gorman

Noah and David Ford were raised in the south but fought on opposite sides in the Civil War. After the war, Noah became a US Army Investigator while David moved to the Montana territory where he chased women and dealt in arms sales. David has an early generation Gatling gun that he has re-engineered to improve its performance considerably. He is promising 30 guns to the highest bidder.

David and his new toy haven’t escaped the attention of the US Army so Noah is dispatched with the hope that the blood connection will help sway David to deal with the Army and not just the highest bidder, of which David has representatives of four interested buyers.

Noah spies on a demonstration and is impressed so he decides to surprise David by dropping in after the audience has returned to town to work out their bids. But when Noah gets down to the barn that houses the gun, his world explodes in a shower of bullets that could only come from a Gatling gun. Wounded in his shoulder and after working up the strength, he crawls into the barn to find David’s throat slashed, lying in a lake of blood, and the gun gone.

Noah gets patched up and spends a day or two in the town hospital. He meets the local marshal and works out a cagey partnership to find out who killed David and then to find the gun. And he starts snooping around the prime spots for information like the saloon, livery, and barber shop.

MRB friend Charlie Stella made a pitch for Gorman on his blog not long ago and the Knuckmeister is usually right on target with his recommendations. Now my partner in the venture also took the bait and chose a Gorman book and didn’t like it. Must've been the choice of titles. Turns out The Killing Machine is part 1 of 3 about The Cavalry Man (assume that’s Noah Ford) and I kind of liked it. Some might say it resembles an old Agatha Christie novel where there are dozens of suspects, each with reason to be the killer, until the book's detective sorts it all out in a big reveal at the end (yeah, but this has a lot of shooting, too). The writing is as sparse as the trees on the far western prairie of Montana making the setting easy to picture while reading. I could see Noah as the grandfather of MRB fav Joe Pickett in his view of right and wrong or his strong and quasi-silent nature. If not Pickett, then maybe Walt Longmire. Either works. Gorman is a Spur Award winner for western fiction as well as Shamus and Anthony awards for his work, so he's got the chops. I’ll look for parts 2 and 3 of this series and get back to you. 

East Coast Don

The Day the Music Died by Ed Gorman

The Day the Music Died by Ed Gorman is the first in a 10-novel series about lawyer/investigator Sam McCain. Gorman is a very prolific author who has never been reviewed in this blog. I saw a recommendation for the 10^th book in the series from one of MRB’s favorite authors, Charlie Stella, who has never written anything or recommended any books that disappointed. I thought I’d jump in from the start of the series, but I was disappointed. It was not the specific book that Stella recommended, so his record is intact. The McCain character is interesting, but the story that surrounded him in The Day the Music Died was not very good. I didn’t find the characters (Judge Esme Anne Whitney, the police chief Cliffie Sykes, etc.) to be particularly believable, and I nearly stopped reading it at the 1/3 mark. But, I was curious about McCain and kept on. Of course, it’s a murder mystery and Gorman has an appealing understated quality to his writing style, but I won’t write any more about this book. I have a category called “airplane books” which is defined as something that would be entertaining enough for a cross country flight, but not one that is so spellbinding that it would prevent a nap, and it wouldn’t break your heart if you left it unfinished on the plane. This one does not quite rise to that level. On Stella’s say so, sometime down the road, maybe I’ll try the 10^th book, Riders on the Storm.

Ultimatum by Simon Kernick

A London family (one of the many Muslims from SE Asia) is assaulted. The family is threatened unless the husband delivers a backpack to a coffee shop at exactly 8am and dropped near the table where a woman and a man are meeting. The weight of the pack and the ruthlessness of the assault on this family convince the husband that he is carrying a bomb. He drops the pack as required and bolts.

The bomb kills and mains dozens of customers. Two detectives are nearby when the bomb goes off. Tina Boyd spots the guy running away and takes up the chase. But the guy gets wasted by a bus. There goes a lead. An unknown Muslim group takes credit and threatens a huge strike in 12 hours unless demands are met. Secondary bombs go off as police close in on clues. The death toll amongst the cops rises as the day progresses.

Tina has a rep in the Met police force, and it ain't good. Seems like every time something goes south, like a perp gets beaten badly, or there is gun play, Tina is in the middle - a loose cannon is she. Just another day on the job for Tina Boyd.

In maximum security wing of the toughest prison sits The Fox, the only guy captured after a terrorist takeover of a London hotel about a year earlier. There is a mound of evidence of his role in the hotel job and he'll never see freedom again. But he notices similarities in the coffee shop bombing and methods his employer used on the hotel takeover . . . and he wants to deal. Names for more favorable treatment, but he'll only talk to Tina, cuz she gets things done.

The Fox gives Tina a name, which she and her partner, Mike Bolt, start to run down. When the tip turns up golden, The Fox offers more in exchange for even more prison benefits. Bolt is hesitant to trust The Fox and is using a disgraced former cop to work undercover who might have hit on something big.

And the clock is ticking, quickly. A robbery of a drug dealer's collection muscle, the murder of a quasi-small time Albanian arms dealer, a South African assassin, the undercover cop's ex-wife, and attempts on The Fox's life in prison are all connected in a web as convoluted as a web spun by a drunken spider. And evening approaches. What in planned to happen when the 8pm deadline approaches is massive. Not only will the major strike horrify residents of the UK and kill many, the actual motivations of those behind this bloody day are not as they seem, not by a long shot.

This is the first book by Kernick I've read (again, thanks to the good folks at Simon and Schuster for the advance copy). If I read Kernick's web site correctly, this is the 6th Tina Boyd novel (out of his list of 18 published thrillers). I recently reviewed a couple of books by L.T. Ryan that started fast and kept up the pressure throughout, but I really wasn't all that enthralled with the characters or the plotting. Not so for Kernick. While this, too starts out at 100mph and stays that way, the characters, plotting, and twists don't leave the reader any time to question what could potentially tear the UK apart - just keep turning the pages and hold on. Took this to a beach week with 18 family members and even amongst the hubbub of such a gathering, I managed to read this in just a couple days. Without distractions, I could've gone cover to cover in one sitting. Kernick? Oh, yeah. I'll be back. Put money on it and take it to the bank.

Ultimatum will be available in the US on September 9, 2014.

ECD