NOTHING TO LOSE: A Jack Reacher Novel
Lee Child
Delacorte Press
Thriller
ISBN: 9780385340564

• Read an Excerpt

NOTHING TO LOSE is Lee Child’s latest, and perhaps most thoughtful, Jack Reacher novel to date. In conceiving these books, Child set for himself a simple but brilliant rule: each installment in the series is effectively a stand-alone work, wholly independent of the others, with Reacher being the only unifying theme. The advantage to new readers is obvious: they can pick a book, any book, and then read the rest in any order. For longtime fans, all one has to remember is Reacher: big, capable and confident, though not unreasonably so, a wanderer who knows his own limitations.

What Child hasn’t done in previous volumes --- at least explicitly --- is to reach for metaphor, which is what he does right up front in NOTHING TO LOSE. At the start of the book, Reacher is on his way to San Diego. His route takes him to Colorado, where he finds himself on a road that will lead him either to Hope or to Despair, two small towns in the middle of nowhere separated by 12 miles of empty road. Reacher chooses Despair, hoping for a meal and coffee when he gets there. What he receives is a hostile reception and an order to leave, along with his java.

Entering Hope after being summarily rejected by Despair, Reacher makes the acquaintance of Vaughn, an enigmatic female police officer who gives him the lowdown on Despair: it’s a factory town, strangers are not welcome, and Reacher would be best to head out around it, or in another direction entirely. But Reacher does not like to back up and, like a tongue probing a sore tooth, begins making frequent if irregular visits to Despair --- some clandestine, some not so. It is almost as if he can’t help himself, for every time he returns, he learns more --- and the more he learns, the less he knows.

Despair is owned and run by a man named Thurman, part industrialist and part preacher who just happens to control the town’s only major industry, which seems to be involved in scrap metal reclamation. There is a lot, however, that does not add up. Why are the townspeople so hostile to strangers? Why does a small private plane leave town late at night after each weekday? What is really going on in that giant factory on the outskirts of Despair? And what is up with that military facility that is nearby, to no discernible purpose? Reacher gets a reluctant Officer Vaughn interested --- and not just in Despair, either --- but Vaughn has a tragic secret of her own, which gives Reacher some added impetus to see things through to an explosive end.

Child drops a couple of informative nuggets about Reacher along the way, as well as factoids about the best type of coffee cup (and why it’s the best), some quick but deep philosophical dissertations (without missing a beat of the narrative) and an extremely innovative use of one of those multi-positional folding ladders. He has constructed the novel so that it’s more than an adventure tale; indeed, there is a mystery at the heart of it that Reacher is able to puzzle out with equal parts logic, intuition and luck.

In a way, he also breaks tradition with what normally takes place in a Reacher story. As a general rule, there has not been much attention paid to how Reacher gets from Point A to Point B; he simply does. The opposite is true in NOTHING TO LOSE, and it may be Child’s response to those who have wondered, jokingly or otherwise, how Reacher seems able to transverse distance (almost) at will during the course of a story.

Be that as it may, NOTHING TO LOSE is sure to please all Reacher fans, new and established.

   --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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