The Midnight Line, by Lee Child

       I just read Lee Child’s latest Reacher, The Midnight Line. It was typical Reacher in style and plot. That’s not a negative comment because most of us hooked on the series enjoy the style and plot similarities. The style always uses sentences that begin with the subject, almost never any introductory information. Most are short, primarily using Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, geometrically precise, just like Reacher himself. Child uses a shifting point of view, mostly Reacher in first-person, shifting briefly to third-person whenever he goes to other scenes not involving Reacher. Thus, the brevity of the Reacher sentences. When he’s in third-person, the sentences are more typically normal than when we’re hearing it from Reacher. Whenever he’s about to engage in a fight with one or more opponents, we get the arithmetic considerations of what he will do, in what order, and in how much time. All this goes click-click-click in his mind before the fight begins. The plots are often the same, involving Reacher heading for new country, wherever the wind takes him. Reacher is a loner by choice and he chooses to wander the county letting fate lead the way. He either takes a bus or he hitchhikes and fate often has him passing through strange little towns with strange little problems. And Reacher, being Reacher, just has to help. In The Midnight Line, he finds a West Point ring in a pawn shop in a tiny Wisconsin town. Why would a West Point graduate pawn this most prized possession? Reacher just has to scratch this itch. He buys the ring for $40, finds Jimmy the Rat, who sold it to the pawn dealer, learns who Jimmy got it from (after the typical geometrically precise fight with eight ugly bikers). That information takes him west to Rapid City and Arthur Scorpio, the unsavory fellow who got the ring from one of his unsavory employees. From there, the trail led him to Wyoming where he hoped to find the tiny woman who had given her ring away. The ring and the plot hinge on illegal drugs, primarily fentanyl and opioids. Typical Reacher, typically a good read.

          In light of all the current news about the rise in deaths from opioids, especially fentanyl, I was intrigued by what Child said about these drugs. He says that an opioid high is almost indescribable, so high and so pleasant that the one hooked will do anything, anything to continue that high, requiring ever higher doses as the body adjusts. Child tells us the history of drug use and abuse, beginning with opium and its derivatives used in many medicines sold routinely for minor aches and pains, for restless babies, for headaches and toothaches and belly aches. From the Civil War up to the present, morphine was used for wartime injuries without regard for dosages or frequency until those injured found themselves hooked. And now we have the same problem with fentanyl and the opioids, indiscriminate use for military injures, indiscriminate prescriptions written for any and all kinds of pain with millions addicted and hundreds of thousands dying from overdoses. Makes me wonder where it all will end, makes me curious about this high that’s higher than any other. Makes me think that pot-heads may not be so bad compared to opioid-heads.