Gone Tomorrow

Starred review from March 2, 2009
All good thriller writers know how to build suspense and keep the pages turning, but only better ones deliver tight plots as well, and only the best allow the reader to match wits with both the hero and the author. Bestseller Child does all of that in spades in his 13th Jack Reacher adventure (after Nothing to Lose
). Early one morning on a nearly empty Manhattan subway car, the former army MP notices a woman passenger he suspects is a suicide bomber. The deadly result of his confronting her puts him on a trail leading back to the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and forward to the war on terrorism. Reacher finds a bit of help among the authorities demanding answers from him, like the NYPD and the FBI, as well as threats and intimidation. And then there are the real bad guys that the old pro must track down and eliminate. Child sets things up subtly and ingeniously, then lets Reacher use both strength and guile to find his way to the exciting climax.

April 1, 2009
Jack Reacher (Nothing to Lose, 2008, etc.), latter-day gunslinger and nomad, finds his latest killing fields in New York City.

Reacher is riding the subway, riding it to nowhere, or anywhere, his destinations of choice these days. Having decided that the constraints of military life have slipped past burdensome into painfully boring, he's packed in a long and lustrous career. Now he takes his missions where he finds them, and he's about to find a beauty. It's the wee hours, the passenger population sparse, when Reacher spots a woman seated some 30 feet away who intrigues him—better put, she causes the hairs on the back of his neck to rise. Not because she's particularly menacing. Actually, most would construe her as a 40-year-old paradigm of harmlessness, but Reacher has become aware that she conforms precisely to the 11-point"list of behavioral indicators" passed on to him years back by Israeli counterintelligence. In short, Reacher's convinced he's looking at a suicide bomber. Is he, isn't he, what will happen if he confronts her? Thereby hangs the tale, and before it's fleshed out, Reacher will have had issues with an inimical variety: the NYPD, the FBI, an ambitious would-be U.S. senator with festering secrets, a pair of ferocious Afghan ladies, as programmed to kill as other ladies are to lunch, and an extended line of miscellaneous miscreants dumb enough to engage him.

No one kicks butt as entertainingly as Reacher.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from April 1, 2009
When a young woman blows her brains out on a New York subway a few feet from Jack Reacher, he becomes understandably perturbed. His quest to find out why takes the large and lethal Clint Eastwood-like loner back to the Cold War and reveals a connection to presidential politics in this 13th Reacher novel (after "Nothing to Lose"), complete with cover-ups and numerous intriguing twists. The government is hiding something, and al Qaeda wants somethingbut what? All the while, goons from both sides assault and kidnap Reacher and two cops who are his companions. Reacher concludes that the Pentagon staffer who killed herself had some kind of information critical to national security. As the dead and injured pile up, the ever-resourceful and vengeful Reacher takes on nearly a score of the bad guys in an exciting climax to an enthralling book that is as satisfying as its predecessors. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 1/09; coming in June is a debut thriller, "Even" ("LJ" 3/1/09), by Child's younger brother, Andrew Grant.Ed.]Robert Conroy, Warren, MI

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2009
The last time we saw Jack Reacher, he was cleaning up a nasty little burg called Despair, Colorado (Nothing to Lose, 2008); now hes tackling a different kind of town: New York City. It all starts on the subway, when Reacher spots a woman exhibiting all 11 of the signs used by Israeli counterintelligence to identify suicide bombers. In the aftermath of what happens on that 6 train, Reacher finds himself in the crosshairs of the FBI, the Department of Defense, the NYPD, one wannabe senator, and two womenthe most formidable foes of allwhose provenance and motives are unclear but who are clearly up to no good. Reacher, former army MP, is the ultimate man alone, pledging no allegiances in a world gone gray, but put a bully in his face, and hell find a reason to stay in town. This time there are multiple bullies, but Reacher isnot easy to stop, even when the odds are 19 to 1, as they appear to be in the full-throttle, blood-splattered finalea brilliant set piece that hits home with the impact of a Reacher head butt. Summarizing Reacher novels always makes them sound more cartoonish than they are; like Stephen Hunter, Child grounds his heros hard body and hard-drive brain in believable detail, and he sets the action against a precisely described landscape (this is a superb New York novel, offering, among other things, a virtual users guide to the subway). If youre a reader whose pulse pounds when a top-notch thriller writer hits his stride, and if youre not afraid to watch the bullet hit its target, then its a safe bet that youre already a Lee Child fan.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)