The Enemy (Jack Reacher, No. 8)
by Lee Child
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Book Summary Information
Author: Lee ChildEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-04-26
ISBN: 0440241014
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Dell
Book Reviews of The Enemy (Jack Reacher, No. 8)
Book Review: A GO for Hollywood
Summary: 2 Stars
Not the full-blown "Thriller" of the Chicago Sun-Times cover blurb, but rather more the police procedural that spends too much time on procedural tedium without providing enough motivation for the reader to soldier on. That, along with the unnecessary digressions, gives the book a padded feel. The author does successfully tick off and satisfy the core catechism of today's political correctness, so the result should be a GO for Hollywood. Of course criminals in this type of fiction always get their constitutional rights violated, but that--setting aside the over-the-top ending--is just part and parcel of this subgenre, which, by the way, hardly means that such writings are "conservative," as is naively believed by many about television's "24." Having now read five Reachers in no particular order, this reader has become increasingly disenchanted. A few reviewers rightly point out that this is "entertainment," not nonfiction. And having no military experience, it is hard to judge the charges by others of massive military inaccuracies. But good novelists need to write fairly realistically on their subject to protect their readers' 'suspension of disbelief.' If Reacher were to investigate, for example, the corrupt practices of a rogue pack of military police dogs, or if he were to become the target of the arms-dealing Quaker Mafia, the minds of many readers would be thrown out of the story, the spell would be broken, and these readers would begin to wonder and think about the author himself. This problem came up big-time in another Reacher novel, in a scene where a group of evil partygoers snatched up a hostage, used him as a shield, and then began chaining out of a house toward Reacher in sort of an extemporaneous killer conga line. Forcing Reacher back toward a cliff edge, this multi-person centipede-like beast miraculously twisted right and left, as if a single organism, dodging any attempt our hero made to safely shoot around the hostage. In the film version, maybe Reacher could be played by Leslie Nielsen. In another Reacher, a serial murder mystery was solved when it turned out that all the victims [Spoiler Alert] had been forced to perform various bizarre complicated suicidal acts by use of hypnosis, which might be plausible for all readers who have spent their lives happily dwelling deep inside a Utah salt cavern and therefore have escaped exposure to any rudimentary information of what hypnosis is capable. On the positive side, it probably says a lot for how skillfully this omni-competent Reacher character has been crafted that it becomes extremely disappointing when the character's creator writes things that are so jaw-droppingly unlikely. In fact, implausible story endings seem to be a specialty. This is doubly unfortunate coming from a writer who obviously possesses the talent to do much better. Overall it can't be denied that Jack Reacher is quite the character, and while he and I are finished, long may he battle the evildoers.
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