One aim of The Sentinel is to bring the Big Guy into the tech world. (Lee’s tricks were smarter and quicker.) And I have no idea why Reacher needs to do so much shopping this time, but he does. It’s presumably Andrew who externalises much of Reacher’s thinking into chatter, turns every fight into a multipage affair and calls excess attention to Reacher’s intrinsic genius for geometry and physics. Reacher stays far too busy dealing with all of this. The Childs need to get back to Lee’s sharp writing game too. Of course he finds local trouble, and he can see it – oh, boy – “as clearly as if a sky writer had spelled it out with white smoke”. And that’s about as much walking as he’ll do in this town, even though Reacher 1.0 favoured long treks that soothed readers. He gets a ride with a travelling insurance guy, then walks right into a trap set for Rusty Rutherford, a newly unemployed IT manager.

There are those of us who always enjoyed the idea of Reacher’s rambling into another little Nowhere, finding somebody in distress, setting things right, draining the diner of coffee and ambling on. Then it heads off to greater metropolitan Pleasantville, Tennessee, and a suitably one-horse town where the real fun awaits. It starts off in Nashville, where Reacher stages that break-in and where, by page 16, he has busted a larynx, a windpipe and a nose, not all belonging to the same person. It’s also action-packed to a fault, which robs it of the leanness that is one of the series’ main attractions. The Sentinel shows the same grisliness that was beginning to turn up in Lee’s later books Andrew wrote that way from the start. That’s a long way from looking “like a condom crammed with walnuts”, as Reacher was described in Tripwire in 1999. He talks too much, gets off fewer great one-liners, isn’t as clever and has stopped being ugly, even if “children had been known to run screaming at the sight of him”. They share writing credit for The Sentinel, which readers of this series will forever think of as the handoff book. He is Jack Reacher, the star of – wait a minute, since when does Jack Reacher do break-ins and shakedowns? Since now, when the Reacher series goes through a bumpy passage as Lee Child, who began the series in 1997, turns it over to his much younger brother.īorn Jim and Andrew Grant, they are now known as Lee and Andrew Child, with Lee’s name in much bigger letters.

He’s looking to threaten its owner for not paying a band.

The Sentinel by Lee Child