Review: Make Me – Lee Child

4 of 5 stars

Series: Jack Reacher 20

My version: Paperback
Fiction Thriller
Bantam Books
2015
Bought

There are weird names all over the country. Why single out Mother’s Rest, in a nation with towns called Why and Whynot, and Accident and Peculiar, and Santa Claus and No Name?

Jack Reacher has no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, so a remote railroad stop on the prairie with the curious name of Mother’s Rest seems perfect for an aimless one-day stopover.

He expects to find a lonely pioneer tombstone in a sea of nearly-ripe wheat…but instead there is a woman waiting for a missing colleague, a cryptic note about two hundred deaths and a small town full of silent, watchful people.

Reacher’s one-day stopover turns into an open-ended quest leading to the most hidden reaches of the internet, and right into the heart of darkness.

A convoluted tale, set once again, in Nowhere, USA. That means, pretty much anything Lee Child can imagine could go on, does. I’m not normally a liker of this sort of cop-out, but…it works very well here. I do like my stories, thrillers, to be placed a little more in a real world, I must admit.

Anyway, it’s all very plausible, and fair rattles along. The style is as you know, as you like and as you’d expect, there are no surprises, but deliver, Mr Child does.

However. There’s still too much tension-reducing filler. Everything is cut, diced and dissected, to the point where you’ve forgotten where the shopping list began. That is a problem, a habit, that Lee Child needs to remove. You can tell that he likes doing it, and sales would seemingly suggest that he’s right. But, if he took all the extra acreage out, it would be a killer result each time.

Oh, and someone really should have told him, it’s the ‘dark web,’ not the ‘deep web,’ don’t you think?

You can buy Make Me, from Booksplea.se