On the remarkably civilized ’80s crime drama “The Equalizer,” the stern, unflappable Edward Woodward played a former intelligence operative who equaled the odds for people in trouble. The show was about wits and strategy rather than fisticuffs.
But no matter how much the notion of guilt- free revenge flatters our good liberal impulses, the concept of the Equalizer can never be as satisfying as the concept of the Pulverizer.
Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels — “Gone Tomorrow” is the 13th — offer almost childishly bracing revenge scenarios. Child’s hero is an ex-military policeman who musters out of the Army after the Cold War ends. With little more than his ATM card and folding toothbrush, Reacher drifts around the United States, encountering people who need his help — and having his sense of justice offended enough to offer that assistance.
I’m not going to make a case for the felicity of Child’s prose, but that’s one quality a good thriller can do without. What a thriller cannot do without are storytelling instincts and the ability to build and sustain suspense. Child has no problem with either.
The opening of “Gone Tomorrow” is one of the most suspenseful sequences Child has written yet. On an uptown 6 train in the small hours of a New York night, Reacher sees a woman who fits every item on the checklist for potential suicide bombers. Reacher turns out to be only partially right: When he approaches her, she draws a gun and blows her head off. The plot begins with the revelation that the dead woman was in the personnel department at the Pentagon and appeared to be in the process of making contact with a foreign national.
Reacher combines the sheer physical strength of an action hero with the wiseguy disrespect we’re used to from hard-boiled shamuses and, in keeping with his training as a military cop, keen deductive powers.
But it would be disingenuous to pretend that the main reason we enjoy Reacher isn’t the pleasure of the violence he inflicts on the bad guys. One defect of “Gone Tomorrow” is that it takes about 200 pages for Reacher to put a hurting on someone. The “someone” turns out to be several federal agents, revealing the craftiness of Child’s approach.
Child has taken a typically right-wing hero — the man of action who believes in the power of force to set things right — and puts him in the service of liberal concerns. The typical villains in a Reacher novel are evil corporations or greedy tyrants. In “Gone Tomorrow,” the villains are the post-Patriot Act feds who represent a country where civil rights are a myth.
“Gone Tomorrow” is the kind of patriotic vigilante fantasy a lefty can love. There’s no doubt Reacher is kicking butt for democracy. That he’s starting with our own government is amusing.
Reading this book is like being tickled with a feather held by an iron fist.
FICTION
Gone Tomorrow
by Lee Child
$27
