No Plan B: The unputdownable new Jack Reacher thriller from the No.1 bestselling authors

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Things do get very involved and the reader needs to concentrate more than is usually required in a Jack Reacher book. There’s a crime sitting behind all of the mystery at the center of this book, but it’s really only presented as an aside with very little substance provided.

We learn about fifteen year old Jed, while living with foster parents, learns that his birth mother is dying of stage four pancreatic cancer and on her death bed finally tells him the truth about his father. Of the first 26 I gave all 5 star ratings except for four which got four star ratings (mostly recent ones).It’s easy to imagine the challenge of coming up with new ways to get Reacher, a retired military cop who drifts aimlessly across the country, into believable situations where he must use his past investigative skills and knowledge to right wrongs that the local cops either can’t or won’t address. And he sees what actually happened: A man in a gray hoodie and jeans, moving like a shadow, pushed the victim to her death—before swiftly grabbing the dead woman’s purse and strolling away. No plan B starts with no focus, too many characters, too much chopping and changing, the first hundred pages were awful.

The device of bringing in ‘colour’ for characters that the reader meets, is laudatory, but can only be effective for a few of them. The other set (the napalm guys) caught the prison guys and had them all strung up by the time Reacher arrived. Lee has three homes—an apartment in Manhattan, a country house in the south of France, and whatever airplane cabin he happens to be in while traveling between the two. Surely this series is ending its course, maybe the author(s) need to consider coming up with something new? Although it doesn’t reach the dizzy heights of the earlier novels, thanks to the intriguing plotting, this is easily the best of the co-written novels so far.

I like that about him, but in this story, I didn’t feel the same connection to the victim, and I really didn’t feel that he did, either. Sam’s ex-wife Hannah Hampton is able to shed further light on the unlikely coincidences, and soon both embark on a road-trip to Winson to further investigate the mystery behind these injustices.

Reacher cannot help but apply his unique investigative skills to right the wrong, that apparently evades the local law enforcement agencies. While No Plan B is number 27 in the Reacher series, it's the third novel written by Andrew "Child" instead of Lee Child. Chloroform takes about five minutes to knock someone out, and the entire time, they’re most likely fighting against their attacker.

Reacher, doing his Reacher thing, smells a rat (and we all know he doesn't react well to threats), so he vows to get to the bottom of it even if it takes him halfway across the country. The details, of course, I can't reveal, except to say there's never a dull moment; all points converge at the end, and readers learn what happens to all the people who started off as strangers but end up as, well, you'll have to read it for yourself to find that out. It’s an action/adventure mystery consisting of three to four plots, each plot seemingly having no relationship to any other--which means we keep skipping from plot to plot, all the while wondering what and where the “big reveal” will be. Then page one was pure setting with elaborate descriptions of buildings/rooms, written in passive voice with too many short, choppy sentences. As always, my sincere thanks to Lee and Andrew Child, Delacorte Press, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of No Plan B!

If it isn't careful, PRH is going to milk this cash cow dry with an annual publishing schedule that takes the loyal reader for granted (Now there's a corporate conspiracy plot line Reacher should investigate). Every loyal reader of this series knows nobody messes with Jack Reacher - he can take down half a dozen very big, very angry men in the blink of an eye. And that’s what compels him to travel from the crime scene in Colorado all the way to the small town of Winson in Mississippi.I’d maybe believe the prison warden found ONE guy who had that much artistic or technical talent, but an entire wing of the prison? During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker. There are the bad guys who run a private prison system that has something to hide, a teenaged runaway looking for his father and an arsonist looking for revenge.