No one writes a thriller like Lee Childs. Jack Reacher is a hero who gets into highly unlikely situations, and resolves them with his strength, experience and his wits. While the situations themselves often involve wildly technically inventive and mostly unbelievable schemes, Reacher is reluctant to even carry a gun. He lives a life on the road, traveling, and does not even carry a bag, choosing instead to purchase clothing and toothbrushes as he needs them.
I just finished 61 Hours. The book is so tightly choreographed that I feel like I should outline it. Seriously. I have difficulty plotting, and the plot and timelines in this book are flawless. Every one works. Childs uses the sixty-one hours of the title (two and a half days) as a countdown throughout the book. That can get irritating and a couple of times it did, but you know what? I never ignored it. That countdown mattered.
A freak tour bus accident strands Reacher in a small town in the middle of South Dakota in winter, with a massive snow storm coming on. Despite the fact that a bus filled (mostly) with seniors is stuck, the police and rescue staff are surprisingly slow to get there. When they do get there, they seem reluctant to offer the stranded travelers shelter. The town recently had a federal prison built nearby, and it is visiting day; all the hotels are full. Reacher immediately intuits that there is something else going on.
The town opens its homes to the stranded travelers, but Reacher, who is not part of the tour (he made a cash deal with the driver to get to Mt. Rushmore), is viewed with polite suspicion by the Chief of Police and his second in command, who finally says Reacher can stay with him. There was a murder in town that night, of a biker, and second-in-command Peterson tells Reacher that there is a large biker encampment outside of town. That is not the problem that has the town with its disproportionately large police force (sixty officers) so jumpy. No, the problem is the witness to a methamphetamine deal, a witness who can bring down the entire biker encampment and put a crimp in meth dealings for an international dealer. The cops have become aware that there is a hit out on the witness, an elderly, retired librarian. Normally, protecting one witness in a small town, with that many police, would not be a problem, but in order to get the federal prison, and the jobs it brought with it, the town had to agree to the prison’s emergency protocols, which means every single officer must respond if the prison alarm siren sounds.
The set-up is pretty ridiculous, and Child’s smooths that over by having Reacher and Peterson both agree that it’s ridiculous. Reacher meets the witness, Janet Salter, who is not what he imagined when he heard “retired librarian.” Librarian? Yes, of the Bodleyian at Oxford, until she returned to the US and managed Yale’s library for a while. Janet is a well-drawn, strong, likeable character who is doing the right thing even though it is impinging on her freedom and threatening her life.
There is one more twist to the story; the piece of property the bikers are squatting on is an abandoned military installation of some kind. Law enforcement thinks the meth lab must be underground in this facility, but no one can get an answer about what it was. Reacher, who was Military Police before he became something more secret and scarier, still has one or two connections, and he agrees to try to find out what the building was. This brings him into contact with Major Susan Turner, who agrees to help him. Through Susan, we find out more about Reacher’s past, even his service-brat childhood.
The building is more and more of a mystery, and there is no tell-tale heat signature that would indicate a meth lab. Unknown to Reacher, the architect of the hit and owner of the meth business, a Mexican criminal called Plato, is running the operation, and he is closer to success than anyone realizes.
The identity of the hit-man is well managed, generating the “I didn’t see that coming!” with “But of course!” a second later — the marks that the author truly played fair. The secret underground facility is frightening, both in its original intent and in its current use. The idea is so outlandish that, paradoxically, Childs makes me believe someone would have thought of this. The design of the underground compound gives Plato, who is only four feet ten (Reacher is six-five) an advantage over our hero. And the riddle of the meth is outrageous and perfect.
The book also works because Reacher is wrong sometimes. Usually he is wrong in details, but the fact that he can reason through a convincing solution, and have it fail, heightens the suspense without making him look stupid.
The thriller part is always thrilling and Reacher is a great character to watch. When all is said and done, though, Childs has an eye for tiny everyday details that make his small towns seem real, no matter how absurd the plot surrounding them is. Whether it’s money-laundering in a whole new way, as in The Killing Floor, or the worst post- nuclear-holocaust idea ever in this book, the towns themselves feel real. Reacher feels real, and that’s why I keep reading these books.