Monday 1 September 2014

Not A Drill

There I was basically complaining about how ordinary his main novel Personal was. And then I read the teaser story Not A Drill and it's a million times more mysterious...and frankly disturbing. How is that even possible? In theory it's got the same mindset as Personal. The big bad US military. There was no hint of it's horror when I skim read the reviews on Amazon. "Goes nowhere" seemed to be the consensus. With readers giving it one or two stars only. Only?

I'll spoil it for you. Gitmo prisoners falling from the sky. Ugh. I never saw that coming. And about one third of this teeny tiny novella is taken up with Reacher aimlessly toing and froing in dense forestry along the US/Canadian border. In fact the structure of Not A Drill is pretty similar to the lovely Deep Down, another fantastic Reacher short story where days were spent in boring military procurement meetings before Reacher solved the mystery and then had a stonking fight against 4 tough guys. (and thus reinforced the legend.) Unfortunately, there's no fighting in Not A Drill. It just gave me nightmares as I slept. Was it written between the 2 MHs? Creepy...and sad, really, that the good guys could be involved in something like this. But great that despite everything that's happened there's still quiet People Who Care about right and wrong. More power to them.

So it goes. I'll be waiting for another year. I can see that.

Friday 29 August 2014

Personal

ditto A Wanted Man (tee hee)

Jeez! Did this novel really take a year to write? I read it in an afternoon and an evening. Hardly even qualifies as a thriller. Think of Personal as the yearly episode of your aunties favourite soap. Yes. It's that mediocre. Featuring the safest baddies in the world...the US secret services. Yawn. This novel seems to be written totally to be made into a nice nice tv movie....for the lifetime channel. Of course I bought it ... and I'll buy the next one. But there won't be many new (or younger) fans for the Jack Reacher series. Shame really. I so wanted either Bennet or Nice to turn out to be traitors. Just for the sake of making the story a bit interesting. The Plot. A sniper has set his sights on taking out World Leaders at the G8 Summit. And Jack has to stop him. Except it never gets to any kind of tension. Day of the Jackal is a more exciting read from 40 years ago. And as Reacher himself points out, the G8 doesn't include the Chinese. Now that might have made an interesting story. Most of the supporting characters are just shallow stereotypes...the serbs, the russian, the brit and the girl. Do people read Reacher for the kills? I wonder. Actually Casey Nice has the best kill...the shard of glass in the throat...but it happens off the page. The really boring stuff...all the detail about Reacher's plane flight from Seattle to Pope Field. All that dreariness about travelling around London...Chingford, Romford, Barking.  Irrelevant minutiae about irrelevant people. Pure padding.

What a weird success the Reacher novels are. Even one of my faves, Gone Tomorrow, if I remember rightly, had no real reason of why that poor woman was being blackmailed. The photo McGuffin.

Oh well. Next year another review. Unless I decide to re-read any of the previously published Reacher novels.

btw I've lost my Kindle..somewhere. So I had to download Personal using the Kindle app on my android...wireless like. It took about 3 seconds and was a perfect read. Fantastic.