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British born and bred Lee Child is about as far away in background from his protagonist, Jack Reacher, as it is possible to get. Despite earning a law degree, Child, who never had any ambition to practise law, went to work for Granada Television for twenty years. Had not the organisation decided to downsize, perhaps the crime fiction world would have been denied one of the more intriguing heroes in its annals. Lee Child makes no bones about it that Jack Reacher was born of a strategic commercial plan. To the author's mind, the largest and most sophisticated reader audience is in the United States so it made sense to him to move to that country after his initial success with Reacher's debut novel Killing Floor. Reacher was created to appeal to the American public and is just as appealing to the wider, global group. Since the first two books -Die Trying won a WH Smith award while Killing Floor won the Anthony - were such huge successes, Child has seen no reason to introduce a different series character. The locales change, to add interest and verisimilitude since Reacher is a drifter, but apart from that, all the author's narratives share a common thread of excitement and a heady pace. Probably if Tripwire, The Visitor, Echo Burning and Without Fail had not been so commercially successful. Child's readers would have made the acquaintance of a different series protagonist. Persuader, which is told as usual in the first person so a degree of guile in hiding things from the reader is necessary, begins dramatically and bloodily enough. Reacher rescues a young student, Richard Beck, from apparent would-be kidnappers. In effecting the rescue, Reacher seemingly assassinates a cop, thereby putting himself firmly on the wrong side of the law. A very large body count, even for a Reacher tale, begins its running total with the scene. Reacher is on the run and, ostensibly reluctantly, drives the rescued youth to his home in a wild and deserted area on the coast of Maine. Zachary Beck, Richard's father, takes Reacher on as a member of his security team. But why would a carpet importer need a security team? The story is told partly in flashback to ten years previously. At the time, Reacher had still been a policeman in the army and a woman, a sergeant, with whom Reacher had been half in love, had been sent on a mission by him and been brutally slain by Francis Xavier Quinn. In the present, Reacher has seen the incredibly resurrected Quinn - incredibly, because Reacher was certain he had been responsible for Quinn's death - and his search for verification of Quinn's identity has embroiled him in an off-the-books operation run by the DEA who are certain that Beck Snr. is importing drugs. Reacher is, as always, placed in extraordinary danger. He is determined to protect a new love interest from the horrid fate that befell her predecessor a decade before. I felt that the dead bodies exceeded, even for Reacher, those of previous adventures but I can't say I have kept a tally, any more than Reacher appears to do. The perils lurking around every corner, inside every warehouse and beyond every seventh wave are, as usual, overwhelmingly dangerous while Reacher's chivalry is tested to its limit what with his disparate responsibilities toward his female colleague and Beck's wife and son. Child writes in a clear style although the staccato sentence fragments can, at times, be quite annoying. Nonetheless, he gets his message across. His style, admittedly, tends to promote tension. Once again the author displays his great knowledge of and presumably passion for, firearms. He discloses a little more of Reacher's history and how he came to leave the army but one gets the feeling that All Has Not Yet Been Told. There is no reason this seventh outing for Reacher should decrease the popularity of that violent hero with a (mainly) pure heart. While I shall certainly greet any new Reacher adventure with pleasure, I would rather enjoy reading a Lee Child novel set in England.
Reviewed by Denise Wels Pickles, October 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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