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.  

The Midnight Line Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child

I read this novel in September, bought it at Sam's as a paperback.  It is a more recent Reacher novel, published 2017, 500 pages.  It begins on a blank intro page, "So far in our history, nearly two million Purple Hearts have been awarded.  This book is respectfully dedicated to each and every recipient."   This tale finds Reacher in my neck of the woods, traveling through WI and on his way to Rapid City, searching for the person whose West Point class ring he retrieved in a Pawn Shop. 

 As the novel begins Michelle Chang has left Reacher, Page 1, "He had seen such notes before.  They all said the same thing.  Either directly or indirectly.  Chang's note was indirect.  And more elegant than most.  Not in terms of presentation.  It was a ballpoint scrawl on motel notepaper gone wavy with a damp.  But elegant in terms of expression.  She had used a simile to explain and flatter and apologize all at once.  She had written, "You're like New York City.  I love to visit, but I could never live there."  He did what he always did.  He let her go.  He understood.  No apology required.  He couldn't live anywhere.  His whole life was a visit."  

This novel includes information about and references to opioids, military injuries, inadequate VA care, PTSD, injured war veterans how the injuries introduce them to addictive pain killers and turn them into addicts, pharmaceuticals, corporations, the DEA,  South Dakota and Wyoming and the history of heroin use in the United States.  

We had just been to South Dakota and Wyoming in August so this was apt reading for me.  A brief summary the West Point ring belongs to an ex Army Major who was severely wounded in Afghanistan.  Reacher encounter many along his search to return the ring because he know it took work to get through West Point especially for a female.  He meets the sister of the ex Major who is also searching for her and had hired a private detective.  Along the way Reacher goes into action to get information from links he uncovers like the mobster running a laundromat in Rapid City and the drug dealers and affiliates the guy employs. 

 Pages 11-12 have classic description about motorcycle riders, an abundant group through 

these parts and across the Midwest especially in the spring, summer and fall months.  "Bikers were as split as Baptists.  All the same, but different. "

Page 282, "Reacher was not a superstitious man.  Not given to flights of fancy or sudden forebodings or existential dread of any kind.  But he woke with the dawn and he stayed in bed.  He felt unwilling to move.....Sometimes you woke up and you knew for sure from history and experience and weary intuition that the brand new day would bring nothing good at all."

Another 5 ***** read.