Persuader by Lee Child

 

Published in 2017 but  I only read  it February, 2024, after I  purchased new through Amazon to prepare for the Amazon Prime Reacher Season 3.    The opening Chapter 1 is very different  with  Reacher in the wrong place at the right time and saving a rich college kid from abduction.  Although it is not apparent  opening that Reacher is part of this scenario and accidentally kills a cop while fleeing the scene.  It took me about 16 pages into the book to realize that was Reacher though I could not imagine him killing a cop.  He gives in to the pleas of the young man who  has persuaded him to drive him home to his family in Maine.  The boy, Richard Beck  is the son of a wealthy rug importer and had been abducted before for ransom.  

Page 26, Chapter 2 is background where Reacher tells he's been in for 11 days, in Boston, on his way to a bar when he sees a man whom he knows he killed a decade ago.  He calls on former Military Police to trace the license plate of the car he saw the man get into.  A warrant officer, Powell,  who knows only of Reacher who'd been out of the Army for 6 years now, takes the call.  But instead of a return call  the next morning,  two federal DEA investigators knock at his motel room door,   Steven Eliot and Susan Duffy.  

They have lost another DEA investigator,  who was undercover 

getting information on Zachary Beck, a rug importer in Maine who is working with a notorious Los Angeles drug dealer.  Duffy explains that their  operation is off the books because the investigator was also off the books.  There were mistakes made getting photos previously of the connection between Beck and the drug dealer.  And so Reacher agrees to help them.  

A brief history of drugs in the Army is on pg. 32, "  Were there drugs in the Army?" Eliot asked.    I smiled.  "Armies love drugs" I said.  "Morphine, Benzedrine.  The German Army invented Ecstasy.  It was an appetite suppressant.  CIA invented LSD, tested it on the US Army.  Armies march on their veins."   "Recreational?"  "Average age of a recruit is eighteen.  What do you think?"  

As in every one of the Reacher novels there is always interesting tidbit information like that on drugs .Pg 143, mentions how steel shanks in the sole of men's' dress shoes gives flexibility and strength.  And that metal detectors are designed to ignore shoes.  And on pg 144 some  mention about Maglite flashlights. This interested me because we had an old one that  corroded from inside by an old battery and I had to toss it.  I always thought I could have used it as a weapon if I had to.  We'd brought it from CA with us when we moved.  "The flashlight was a big black Maglite, the length of a nightstick.  Six D cells inside.  We used to use them in the army.  They were guaranteed unbreakable but we found that depended on what you hit with them and how hard,"  But enough of the miscellany. 

Another excellent read that has me anxiously awaiting the Amazon movie.  Another 5*****.  All 465 pages.  At the end is an intro and  the first chapters of Midnight Line.