Customer Reviews

Gone Tomorrow (Jack Reacher, No. 13)

5 star:		(133)
4 star:		(83)
3 star:		(44)
2 star:		(25)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

Some readers were disappointed by Nothing to Lose. They have my personal guarantee that they will not be disappointed by Gone Tomorrow. Jack Reacher is back and he's back with a vengeance. Literally. The story opens with Reacher on a northbound NYC subway car, one built in Japan, to specifications which he discusses in detail. Why? Because Jack is a curious man and so are the readers who overhear him telling his stories. He also details the specifications because they will come back to play a role in the story several hundred pages later. On that car, in the middle of the night, a woman who appears to be a potential suicide bomber does something else instead. Her action haunts Jack and he does not rest until he knows the reasons for her actions and exacts vengeance on those who have caused those actions.

Except for some brief moments in Washington, Gone Tomorrow is set in Manhattan, a city that both Jack Reacher and his creator know very well. The wide cast of characters includes members of the NYPD, the FBI, miscellaneous defense/homeland security types, some private security forces and some uber-baddies from Turkmenistan. The plot involves actions from the early 1980's and actions from today's headlines. The plot is as tight (to adapt one of the novel's similes) as the endpoint of the alimentary canal of a piscine creature. There is a bit of sex and a great deal of violence (strong but not pornographic).

The novel is replete with information, as Child taps into the wellsprings of the techno-thriller. There is also a great deal of ratiocinative mystery: how can you find someone in NYC in the middle of the night? How can you deduce the likely behavior of an individual from the scant remaining facts at your disposal? What are the best moves to employ against two individuals coming at you with brass knuckles? Why do you need a glove to operate a certain form of automatic weapon? How do the government's security-system computers operate?

This is Lee Child at his best: jackhammer suspense, pages flipping at light speed and Jack Reacher in full-tilt sarcastic mode, with a small army of baddies deserving of the business end of his best skills. Only one bit of advice: begin it when you have the time to finish it, because that is exactly what you will want to do. This is primo stuff; don't miss it.

Lee Child's "Gone Tomorrow" is the 13th Jack Reacher installment. It is a much needed return to the stylings to which we loyal fans became addicted; certainly, it is far superior to the politically slanted "Nothing To Lose." My sole quibble with "Gone Tomorrow" is that Child again, although with much more subtlety, infuses his British perspective of American policy into Reacher's actions and consciousness. As a loyal reader of a great character, I am not interested in Lee Child's view of American foreign policy, past or present.

That being said, this novel begins with a random incident on a late night subway in New York where Reacher suspects a passenger of being a suicide bomber and due to his intervention, a death occurs which motivates him to trace the victim's backstory in hopes of understanding who and what caused the unnecessary tragedy. A continuous series of government and private agents begin confronting Reacher assuming he has valuable knowledge(and property)gained from the victim. Before one settles in, Reacher is fending off the NYPD, FBI, Homeland Security, paid investigators, and a slew of foreign bad guys that will please anyone's appetite for evil villains.

Reacher is as perceptive, logical,and analytical as ever in "Gone Tomorrow." He actually instructs the reader about a number of arcane minutiae such as how to knife fight, defend against brass knuckles, and disappear in NYC. Reacher is less taciturn and more focused than he has been recently and even pals up with NYPD detective and a grieving father for a time.

There is more than ample violence and gore to please the loyal Reacher fan, the plotting is tight, and Reacher continues to be fun to decipher as he analyzes people and events. As usual, Jack Reacher is NOT a character you want mad at you or to seek vengeance against you. And Child does a fasacinating job of describing Manhatten and the underbelly environs of NYC.

For me, the mark of a fine writer is his/her ability to entice me into reading chapter after chapter in a comfortable flowing exposition and not realizing the passage of time or the need to suspend disbelief. Child can do that when he is at his best--entice the reader to become one whith his signature character. I just hope he works more diligently to leave his political slant out of future Reacher novels.

Gone Tomorrow is the 13th novel in the Jack Reacher series. Reacher is a retired Army MP and a drifter who seems to find big trouble wherever he goes. Reacher is a great character and all the novels in this series are entertaining, but they are very uneven in terms of plot credibility and overall enjoyment.

Gone Tomorrow is one of the absolute best of the series. As the novel begins Reacher finds himself on the subway late at night in New York City and happens to see a passenger, Susan Mark, acting strangely. This sets off all kinds of alarm bells for Reacher who is trained to spot terrorists and other nefarious characters looking to do others harm. As the events unfold Reacher finds himself chasing, and being chased, by the FBI, the Department of Defense, the New York City Police Department, and a shadowy group of possible terrorists, all looking for a piece of explosive information, and willing to kill to get it.

This novel is a fast paced thriller and mystery and works extremely well as both. The plot becomes intricate and mysterious as Reacher tries to find out who is behind the events unfolding, and then tries to discover why the information being sought is so important. There are plenty of twists and turns as Reacher continues to unravel the mystery to a rather explosive and violent conclusion.

Other than a few quibbles over political details that are over generalized, this novel was a real page turner and very entertaining. One of Lee Child's best.

The Jack Reacher of the earlier novels is gone; all that remains is a shell of a man who, for much of the story, acts as little more than a bystander to what is happening around him, until nearly halfway through Gone Tomorrow. The story opens with an interesting scene involving a suicide, including a tedious recitation of ways to identify a suicide terrorist, then virtually nothing happens until almost page 180.

The early Reacher was immediately involved in the storyline, often with strong action, maintaining an intense pace until the end. In Gone Tomorrow, Reacher does little except stand by and speculate, rather than act as the action hero.

One reviewer gave a personal guarantee that I would not be disappointed with Gone Tomorrow. Well, I am here to collect on that guarantee. I found the book tedious, slow-paced, and boring. I miss the old Reacher. Perhaps, it is time for him to settle down with his buddies and tell their war stories; he is no longer an action hero.

I alse had a problem with many of the carboard characters: the men in black suits from an intelligence agency, lawless private security, inept police, a required woman for an irrelveant sex scene, psychopathic killers, a superficial and obviously devious Senator, and the use of traveling back and forth from New York to Washington.

The main premise, of a secret operation in the Middle East which resulted in awards for the participants, but which is also buried deep inside a miitary depository of secrets, is, of course, a huge blinking sign that says, "Here is the answer." Since it involved a Senator running for President, the reader is not-so-subtly reminded that this "secret" could bring down the candidate.

A great deal of time was wasted in the author creating a "mood," and little time with moving the story ahead.

Reacher was an action hero, now he is just a middle-aged man who wanders the night, occasionally buys new clothes, lives on the cheap, and seems to have never learned--after 12 novel adventures--how to deal with modern technology, including turning off a cell phone. He comes across as being a man out of his element, an anachronism in a modern world. No wonder it takes him so long to discover the obvious solutions to the questions posed in Gone Tomorrow.

Fair or not, every Lee Child Jack Reacher book has to be compared to the other Jack Reacher books. This was a reassuring step up from last year's "Nothing to Lose", but it still just missed. Like all the Reacher books, it can stand alone, but knowing the main character gives the reader instant familiarity with his eccentricities.

This entry in the series has plenty of action, especially in the last fifty pages, and plenty of Reacher's stellar deductive reasoning. However, the setting, like that in "Nothing to Lose" just doesn't ring true (understanding that "ringing true" in any of these books is a relative term). The old Jack Reacher used to be thrust into situations where he was forced to fight the bad guys to a) save some one; and b) save himself. In this book as in last year's, Reacher thrusts himself into a life-threatening situation just because he "hates to go backward". It's fine if a character does not want to walk away, but the plot here is so forced it really defies logic, especially for Reacher who likes to portray himself as a person who reacts rather than an agressor.

That having been said, the plot is still a good one. The foreign female characters are excellent (can't say much more without giving it away). What appears to be a suicide to start the novel is much much more and just the tip of the iceberg with foreign intrigue, the NYPD, FBI and nameless national agencies all aligned against Reacher at one time or another and even, for a short time, all at once. Once again, Reacher defies the odds through his unique blend or Holmesian reasoning and physical prowess.

All in all, a fair book, but nothing great. I hope Reacher is not tiring.

After the boring debacle that was Nothing to Lose, I was looking forward to Gone Tomorrow. It's a distinct improvement--this one's in an urban setting, without a quasi-biblical apocalyptic cult. Problem: like Nothing to Lose, there's another apocalyptic cult (militant Islamists), and the same habit of going back and forth between known locales as in the last one. Only the distances increase as Reacher bounces between New York and Washington, then back and forth between the same neighborhoods and hotels in New York.

Fight scenes seem few and far between in this one, which is a downer. One of the characters leaps off the page as involved elsewhere in the story (I'm terrible at figuring mysteries out ahead of time and this was obvious). Reacher suspects it but the character's facility with math (!) allays his suspicions until he's proven wrong.

Also it's sad to see Reacher whining and going all PC: "I don't like knives," but then uses one supplied him by an ally. One has to wonder if Child has been caught up in the UK's anti-knife propaganda for this book as much as he bought PETA's BS for "Bad Luck and Trouble," writing that if the late Tony Swan supported them, they must be a worthwhile group--NOT.

Child's errors regarding weapons' capabilities and their use have improved a lot since "Killing Floor." However, it's disconcerting to see Child inserting what seem deliberate errors on weapons use and operation: as far as I'm aware, no SIG pistol has been made with a magazine safety, and this "fact" is key to one of the fight sequences in the book.

Here's hoping the next book follows "The Enemy" in going back to Reacher's past, only while he was a member of his special unit. A story with the full hand-picked team would be twice as good as "Bad Luck and Trouble"--my favorite--which had only three others.

Lee Child is a journeyman author of airport books. He usually writes entertaining stuff, but he is becoming the victim of his own success. This book was cranked out on a tight schedule from the publisher. If Child had had more time, he would have written a shorter book. This one desperately needs a good edit. Reacher should be allowed to age gracefully. He is a protagonist in his late 40's who never works out, sleeps 1-3 hours every other night, drinks gallons of coffee, eats mostly fast-food, doesn't own a gun or practice with one, and yet remains in perfect physical condition and able to shoot any firearm with extreme accuracy on demand. I know this is fiction, but Child should leaven his imagination with a little reality.

The first and best news is that Lee Child is back in form with "Gone Tomorrow". While not the all time best Reacher novel that I have read, this is a more than satisfactory addition to the series. It involves some truly unpleasant villains, a politician with a deeply guarded secret, a missing son and plenty of tension. One thing I love but also find quite disconcerting when I'm reading a Reacher novel is the way that he deliberately seeks out and provokes the bad guys. It's so much the opposite of the way that I would behave that I find it quite nerve-wracking to read. And in this book, he does it a LOT.

It starts with Reacher on a New York subway in the small hours of the morning. He spots a woman, Susan Marks, whose behaviour meets every criteria for a suicide bomber. She's not. But she is a woman in trouble. Reacher can't help Susan, but he can't let the matter rest until he finds out what was behind her state of mind and finds the people who drove her to that point. Although at various times he recruits her brother and a friendly police officer as allies, essentially this is Reacher taking on the bad guys on his own.

The first half of the book is all set up and it's quite gradual. Reacher is a little slow off the mark: there are a couple of revelations that seemed pretty obvious to me, but which take some time to emerge. On the other hand, I wasn't sure for quite some time who the villains would turn out to be, which I enjoyed. In the second half, Reacher goes after the villains: this half is dead exciting and includes some of the most graphic descriptions of violence that I can remember Lee Child writing.

There is one central implausibility: Reacher is told repeatedly that he'll be in deep trouble if he finds out a particular secret. But when he does find it out, suddenly it doesn't seem to matter that he knows. Reacher also has developed an unlikely ability to track down his adversaries with ease. Some key plot elements are left unresolved. And the obligatory roll in the sack feels just that: out of place and only there because it's expected. However, at the end of the day the book's momentum means that these are just annoyances, not critical flaws.

Unusually, this book is written in the first person (as if Reacher is narrating): only three other Lee Child books have used this. It's not my preference given that Reacher is such an enigma, but it works fine. It's a great read: enjoy!

First, let me add my comment to the other reviewers who have actually read the latest "Reacher" novel instead of complaining about the price on Kindle. (The average rating for those who read the book is four or five stars.) I enjoyed "Gone Tomorrow" more than "Nothing to Lose," based on sheer pace and suspense without quite all the apocalyptic political "baggage" that weighed down the last novel.

While Child still has some points to score about the Patriot Act, Donald Rumsfeld, and so on (I don't want to give away the plot), he also depicts some characters in our government worthy of Reacher's (and the reader's) respect. More importantly, "Gone Tomorrow" is vintage Reacher in terms of allowing the reader to solve the puzzle alongside our hero. There are some terrific action sequences and, as always, everything Reacher observes and learns along the way comes in handy at the end.

All this being said...I'll save the 5-star review for the next Reacher book that takes Jack into his true element...in the middle of nowhere, one man against the world.

Some time ago, I read Lee Child's Without Fail. I remember it as an exciting read, but it didn't cause me to seek another Child novel. Recently, I picked up Gone Tomorrow. Simply put, it's a great book.

If you're willing to accept the basic premise that a spellbinding adventure could flow from witnessing a woman (a complete stranger) kill herself on a New York subway, then the book makes sense. The hero, Jack Reacher, is a fortyish veteran of thirteen years' service as an MP officer. As an MP, he was engaged in special investigations all over the world. He developed first-rate fighting skills and marksmanship. Now, he wanders about on a limited budget confronting (and relishing) any dangerous challenge that comes his way.

Reacher is a sort of James Bond on the cheap. He stays in expensive hotel rooms at a steep discount by bribing maids and night clerks to let him in off the books. He takes a bus to get around. He'll walk to save bucks. He remembers where there's a cheap eatery with good food.

Reacher is also largely uncomfortable with today's technology. He describes himself as the only guy in America without a cell phone. He's unsure about how to play a DVD in a computer.

Gone Tomorrow centers on a search for a flash drive that contains a picture that may incriminate John Sansom, North Carolina Congressman and senatorial candidate. The picture was taken in Afghanistan in 1983 when Sansom met with what many consider to be the most evil man on the planet. Sansom, the DOD, FBI, Homeland Security, and a particulary vicious (but stunningly beautiful) terrorist, Lila Hoth, all want that picture in the worst possible way. Lila proves to be almost as cunning and resourceful as Reacher.

Child pays meticulous attention to detail. The story is set in Manhattan and Child shows a familiarity with the island and its people that could only come from tirelessly roaming the mean streets himself.

The book clearly reflects careful writing and editing. There are no typos, no awkward phrases. Not a single useless character.