night school

Lee Child is at it again. My wife picked up two recent Jack Reacher novels, burned through both of them pretty quick, then suggested I read them too.

I have a little bit of a backlog of books that I've read now, and so by the time I get this posted some time will have probably gone by and I'll be reading (or have read) the next one.* This one is called Night School. And I get the impression this title is for lack of anything else, as it doesn't really give too much of a hint about the content of this one.

I haven't read all of the Reacher series, and I certainly haven't read them in order, but it appears that 'in order' may now be in question. If I'm not mistaken, this story was written and published later than some others, but does not fall 'after' in the overall timeline. Seems as though Child is going back into the timeline, and filling in some of the blanks. At the beginning of this story, Reacher is just back from a mission in the Balkans. This story may even represent a mission Reacher spoke about in an earlier story, and the Balkans mission may have also been an earlier book, but I'm not enough of a fan to know either of those things. But maybe the internet is; lets look.

Well, I looked, and it seems like this book is more of a prequel to the entire series. It may have been referred to in conversation, or some old file in an earlier (later?) book, but I don't find any reference to it.

Looks to me like, Child has taken this step back to keep Reacher from turning into that "Murder She Wrote" lady, who just seems to be minding her own business, and they someone is strangled with piano wire in the back of a New England, seaside curio shop she's visiting. Every week. she's like the fourth horsewoman of the apocalypse, or somethin'. it ain't right

So this was pretty good, but not great. A little slow in spots, and I guess I'm a little more used to the Reacher of the later novels, who usually works alone, and isn't as hemmed in by superiors and rules. That being said, I'm not quite sure how he can get away with executing someone, just for being a bad dude.

If you're a Reacher fan, you're going to read it anyway, if you aren't then, this is probably not the place to start.


* Update: It has been a week or two since I wrote this in draft form, after revising it for posting, I can confirm that I didn't go on to read the next one in the series. I've been reading some other things.