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.
