A Wanted Man

I just finished Lee Child’s latest Jack Reacher novel, A Wanted Man. It was typical Child, with inordinate attention to detail, mostly numbers, dimensions, time. Reacher is a storehouse of historical and geographical detail, and his inner clockwork and logic is again on display. Reacher is hitchhiking out of Nebraska, his clothes dirty and bloody, his nose mashed all over his face from his final encounter with the bad guys in The Affair, and he is somehow picked up by a car with two men and a woman driving east to Chicago. Or at least that’s where they say they’re going. They’ve picked him up to use him as a second decoy to help them avoid the roadblocks they know will be ahead of them, all of them with an all-points bulletin looking for two men, not three men and a woman. The plot involves a terrorist plot to contaminate the water supply in the Midwest, with the CIA and the FBI fumbling around trying to prevent it. This is another in the series about how Reacher, the loner, the extremely adept killing machine, the logician foils nearly everyone to bring the bad guys to justice—his kind of justice. I love this series as do millions of other readers, and I can’t wait for the Reacher movie to come out in December (called, naturally, Jack Reacher). I’m only sad that they cast Brad Pitt to play Reacher. How in the world can Brad Pitt portray a guy 6’ 5” weighing about 250? Can’t be done. And for those Reacher fans out there who haven’t yet read this latest one, here’s a Reacher riddle: How can you speak for a full minute without simply repeating a word or phrase and without using the letter A? You’ll have to read the novel to get the answer.