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PERSUADER is the 7th book in the Jack Reacher series, and by far, one of the best that I've read. The opening scene which involves a kidnapping that Reacher prevents, then kills a cop in the process, is the beginning of an operation using deceit, and violence. When Reacher sees an old nemesis in Boston, one Francis Xavier Quinn, he realizes that a take down operation from 10 years ago in which he supposedly killed Quinn, had failed. Back to the present, Reacher is contacted by two DEA agents, Susan Duffy and Steven Eliot, who want to extract an undercover agent, Teresa Daniels. It seems Daniels went missing after being placed in Zachary Beck's operation, who is fronting for Quinn in the Boston area. After Reacher rescues Beck's son, Richard, from an attempted kidnapping in which he accidentally kills a cop, he insinuates himself into the operation Beck is running. Slowly, Reacher removes the various players from the game using extreme force to get further up the food chain. After becoming Beck's head of security, having duped the previous one into a shootout, Reacher learns Beck is smuggling guns into the country for the various drug gangs around. When Reacher has to dump an agent into the ocean, after she had been tortured and killed, he learns that the ATF is also after both Beck and his cohorts. Meanwhile, Reacher is recalling how the operation from his Army days centering on capturing Quinn could have failed. The author blends these flashbacks in without disrupting the story, or chopping the book into little chapters. There is one fight scene which is outstanding in which Reacher has to battle Paulie, a meth-steroid muscle bound freak, in hand to hand combat. Being battered, nearly beaten, Paulie makes one mistake in his fighting Reacher, allowing Reacher the opportunity to cripple and destroy him. After that, the action moves furiously to a final climax with a speed that makes the book move along at a fast clip. PERSUADER is one of those books which will either appeal to readers or not. The flow of the book reminded me of Child's first book, The Killing Floor, where the reader is allowed to be inside the protagonist's head, as he moves from scene to scene, battle to battle.
Reviewed by Steven M. Sill, May 2003
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