"DIE TRYING" by Lee Child (A-)

Jack Reacher is a cooly analytical giant of a man some six and a half feet tall with a build to match. After a life spent in the military, first as an army brat and then as a much decorated Marine, Reacher has decided to leave the military and spend a few years traveling around the country that he has spent his entire adult life defending.

Now without a family and not ever having lived on a base inside the States, Reacher is a lone wolf, a rootless wanderer who feels more like a visitor than a citizen in his native land. Reacher is one of those guys whose fate is always to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Of course, that is why there is a story!) Fortunately, the lessons that he has learned as a military policeman and then as a homicide detective after being sidelined by war injuries come in handy in helping him to approach his problems with a calculating professionalism. I say "problems," because Reacher hasn't yet decided on becoming a private eye or a mercenary, so at the moment it is a case of trouble finding him instead of the other way around.

This is the second Lee Child novel after his introduction of Reacher in his earlier, "Killing Floor" (also reviewed). There are writers who specialize in character, and then there are writers who specialize in detail. Child is a genius at detail. His stories are well thought out and very complex. His villains are geniuses gone awry, and the plots are intricate, so much so that it is difficult to get a grasp on what is going on until the plans are thankfully laid out by someone in the know.

Child's knowledge of guns and ordnance is scary. Each bullet leaving a gun is described in minute detail as to how it leaves the barrel, how it arcs through the air, how fast it goes, and how long it takes to get to its target. Every gun is described both as to its usefulness in combat and its efficacy as a murder weapon.

All this is very interesting from an intellectual standpoint as it leaves us in a "you are there" kind of mentality. And it can never be said that Child's stories are slow or uninteresting; quite the contrary - His stories are fast paced and fascinating. What they are not is long on character development. I don't know any more about Jack Reacher after reading two books than I did when I started the first. The little that I do know about him is that he loves blues music.

Child is pretty thin on filling out the personality of a man. I want to know who this man is, and Child won't let me into what makes him tick. As a writer, Child is almost the mirror image of Robert Crais. Crais is long, very long, on personality and less strong on his plots. However, his books are a joy to read because Pike and Cole, his lead characters, are both fascinating individuals. These two guys would be interesting at a lunch together. Reacher is almost an automaton by comparison. I love the plots, but I am still searching for the measure of the man. Maybe in the next Lee Child novel.

Reacher was getting used to life on the outside after the turbulence of his last "involvement" when he was set up on a false murder rap in Margrave, Alabama. After corpses have been left all over the county in the service of justice, Jack has belatedly headed towards Wisconsin for the summer. A devotee of Jazz, he has stopped in Chicago to work as a bouncer at a South Side blues club.

While downtown in the Loop, a young woman with a crutch stumbles into his arms as she leaves a dry-cleaning store. Her dry cleaning falls to the ground, and it is all Reacher can do to help her out before she ends up on the sidewalk. While holding her, he becomes aware of two men, one of whom is sticking a gun into his waist and the other who is doing the same to the young lady. They are both hustled into a black sedan waiting at the curb and driven to the South Side. The car is set ablaze after they are handcuffed together and placed in the back of a white Econoline van.

It is to be a very long drive together. Nights are spent locked in barns while days are spent driving for hours on the highway. Where or for what reason neither of them can imagine. She turns out to be a young FBI agent by the name of Holly Johnson. Holly doesn't know who Reacher is, nor is she aware of his background. She encourages him to escape, but he is not willing to leave her alone with the three men.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago the FBI slowly begins to realize that one of their agents is missing. Agent-in-Charge McGrath personally takes charge and he commands agents Brogan and Milosevic to form a small team to search for evidence as to what happened to agent Johnson.

Washington is watching and very interested in his progress. Harland Webster, the head of FBI, becomes personally involved in the investigation for the simple reason that it turns out that Holly is the daughter of General Johnson, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the President of the United States.

Other than the burnt sedan, the clues are few and far between, but they eventually lead to Beau Borken and a shadowy paramilitary group holed up in the wilderness of northern Montana. Why Holly has been kidnaped and for what purpose she will be used is a mystery to all, especially Jack Reacher, who has to overcome a wall of secrecy surrounding his fellow hostage. If it were not for her recent injury, Johnson would be almost as tough as Reacher. She slowly comes to trust this stranger as a man of action who is more than capable of protecting her.

Unfortunately, the FBI comes to an entirely different conclusion. Reacher is finally identified from the tapes confiscated from the dry cleaner security cameras. McGrath and his team leap to the mistaken impression that Reacher is one of the kidnapers. Now the FBI has him in their gun sights for kidnaping an agent, and the FBI always looks out after their own. G. Putnam's Sons, 1998, 374 pages.