From NY Times:
Books of The Times 'The Hard Way'
Lee Child's Intrepid Hero Coolly Navigates a World of Hurt
By JANET MASLIN
Published: May 11, 2006
Manhattan. SoHo. Daybreak. A lone figure moves watchfully down West Broadway until he sees a partygoer passed out in a doorway. In the prone man's pocket he spots a rectangular shape, 2 5/8 inches by 3¼ inches, half an inch thick. He recognizes this as folding money: mostly $20 bills from an A.T.M. withdrawal, plus smaller-denomination change from a taxi fare. He's guessing it adds up to $173.
(cont below)
Sigrid Estrada
Lee Child
THE HARD WAY
By Lee Child.
371 pages. Delacorte Press. $25.00.
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Moving carefully, working one hand's middle and index fingers like a pincer, he reaches carefully into the pocket to extract the cash. And then — ouch! — he is very sorry. Because the sleeping giant in the doorway is Jack Reacher. And he hasn't been sleeping. And for Jack Reacher there is only one word for this would-be thief: amateur. Reacher, on the other hand, is a professional.
"I call it the dawn patrol," explains the newly injured pickpocket. "There's sometimes two or three guys like you."
"Not exactly like me," Reacher answers. This is an understatement. Nine red-hot books ago, Lee Child concocted the rough, tough Superman of the crime-busting genre, as smart and charismatic as he is unbeatable. And then Mr. Child broke the mold.
Early next week (why delay good news?), Reacher returns in this series' 10th installment, "The Hard Way." It's one more labyrinthine story that takes off like a shot: as usual, Mr. Child has you at hello.
Crime writers will do anything to grab attention in a book's opening paragraph, but Mr. Child achieves this without breaking a sweat. There's Reacher at a Greenwich Village café. He ordered espresso: "foam cup, no china," because he's a man who might leave in a hurry. "And before it arrived at his table he saw a man's life change forever." Neat little flourish: "Not that the waiter was slow."
Once again Mr. Child combines brute force and brilliant deduction in the 6-foot-5 person of this footloose, mysterious former military police officer. Reacher's Army training serves him well when he is recruited to find the kidnapped wife of a shady figure named Edward Lane. Lane runs a highly profitable band of mercenaries who have meddled in other countries' affairs all around the globe. As one of them tells Reacher:
" 'We go anywhere Uncle Sam needs us.'
" 'What about where Uncle Sam doesn't need you?'
"Nobody spoke."
Mr. Child is so clever that he makes Reacher too clever. Reacher calmly reels off his suppositions about the kidnapping, and they all turn out to be wrong. That's part of what keeps this game interesting, as are the author's superb plotting skills and fondness for unusual story angles. Not long into "The Hard Way" it is revealed that the abduction of Kate Lane and her daughter, Jade, is the second of its kind. Why has Edward Lane had two beautiful wives kidnapped ?
When "The Hard Way" begins unraveling Lane's history, it winds up in grisly places. The mercenaries' activities in Africa have had lingering consequences, and the book describes them unflinchingly. For instance there is an imprisoned soldier of fortune who spends a year looking at his hand, for reasons that are ghastly in the extreme.
Lane's role in the book becomes an occasion for what is heavy sadism, even for Reacher. This mean streak goes (one hopes) beyond most readers' capacity for vicarious enjoyment.
But the unalloyed satisfaction in Mr. Child's books comes from his main character's thought processes. And Reacher's command of minuscule details remains sublime. There are no casual observations here, not even the superfastidious ones that seem more crazy than canny. Reacher is the kind of guy who has no idea what a Staples store sells (he doesn't have a change of clothing, let alone an office) but scopes out a store with relentless curiosity. The biggest thing Staples sells is a desk, he notices. Which is the smallest? Thumbtack or paper clip? That depends on whether the measure is size or weight.
Once again there is disarmingly dry humor in the contrast between Reacher's brawn and his delicate sensibilities. (As a child he was horrified by the punctuation of traffic signs reading, "DONT WALK.") And once again a book of Mr. Child's pivots on logistical details that amount to trigonometry, culminating in a prolonged siege enacted with stunning, compass-point precision.
Reading Mr. Child is not only a mentally transporting experience but also, at times, a physical one. Don't be surprised to find your hand replicating the finger movements that tip off Reacher to a keypad matrix's four-digit combination.
"The Hard Way" starts in New York and winds up in the English countryside. ("This is the back of beyond. Farm country. Somebody's always shooting something. Foxes, road signs, burglars, each other.") Beyond that, the specifics should remain surprising, but this much can be said: Reacher spends much of this book roaming around Manhattan. He's been there before. But in "The Hard Way" he does something that, by his own admission, he hasn't before: shop at Macy's, as part of a plot that also involves Bloomingdale's.
These are deflating moves. Something about this guy's maverick nature keeps him implausible as even a semidomesticated creature.
Then again, homebodies don't lie in downtown doorways. Neither do the detectives in other books in this genre. But Reacher knows there's no better way to hide in plain sight than to feign unconsciousness. He knows how to race across a plowed field with a stride calibrated to hit the top of every furrow. And he knows how to sprint around a building in 30 seconds, in this book's pièce de résistance, even though that isn't his top speed.
"An Olympic athlete would have done it in 10," he tells the reader. "But an Olympic athlete didn't need to be composed enough at the finish line to fire a submachine gun."
Wrap....
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