Exit Strategy by Lee Child & Andrew Child

I look forward to my annual Jack Reacher novel, especially as they always come out around the time of year that back in the cultural golden age of the nineties and noughties, we would see proper action films being released at the cinemas. Action films in which a lone human who is actually entirely human manages to enact feats of bloody restitution that are totally beyond human credibility and all the more brilliant for being so seem to be a thing of the past, so I am grateful that Lee Child and Andrew Child keep churning out novels that keep the dying art alive. Not that Exit Strategy is peak Reacher – as any glance at online fan sites will make you cacophonously aware – but it’s certainly better than last year’s In Too Deep, and will give any non-diehard plenty of fun as we await the release of the next season of Reacher.

Exit Strategy gets off to a promising start: Reacher, freshly arrived in Baltimore to catch a band he’s a fan of, happens to be drinking his customary mug of black coffee in an establishment where an elderly couple are being quite obviously conned out of their savings. Cue the first act of violent restitution, and a very nice bit of violence it is. Naturally, what Reacher sees is just the outer edge of a dark and tenuously interconnected web of criminality that ultimately leads to a military contractor attempting to engineer a false war so that he can profit off the deaths of US citizens (and the deaths of, presumably, a load of foreign nationals as well, but the novel doesn’t pay much attention to that).

The main problem with Exit Strategy is that the small stuff is handled well: Reacher’s dealings with the petty criminals and street toughs he encounters is pleasingly brutal and more or less convincingly handled – bar the inevitable moments of verbal clunkiness that one has to simply learn to overlook – but the big stuff falls flat. The novel is obviously building to a showdown between Reacher and the military contractor. The showdown arrives. It’s a massive let-down. Infiltrating the contractor’s secret underground base is ludicrously easy. Finding the man who has built a wildly profitable business and is able to manipulate congress and mastermind overseas wars is ludicrously easy. Killing him? You guessed it. Ludicrously easy. All the jeopardy falls away, and with it all the novel’s impetus.

Still, I enjoyed it. And I’ll read the next one. And probably the next 30 if the Child brothers keep the family business going that long. But I’ll also keep hoping for better.