Gone Tomorrow
Lee Child
Dell, 2009
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-0440243687
576 pages; $9.99

61 Hours
Lee Child
Delacorte Press, 2010
ISBN 978-0-385-34058-8
400 pages; $28.00

Jack Reacher has been one of my heroes for about the last decade, ever since I first discovered Lee Child’s protagonist in his long-running series of thrillers. In much the same way that Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone became so real to me that they were practically friends of the family. This loner, who owns nothing but the clothes on his back, a portable toothbrush and an ATM card to a bank account that keeps him in funds, always seems to find trouble – and to fix it.

In recent years, Reacher’s adventures have gotten a bit less compelling, seemed a bit too similar to one another, and sometimes fell over the edge into nihilistic violence that were just a bit too much for my taste. This devolution seemed complete in Gone Tomorrow, in which Child seemed to have been bitten by the “bestseller bug” that afflicts so many ultra-successful thriller writers: short chapters (usually three to five pages long) with short paragraphs, plenty of sentence fragments as stand-alone paragraphs to build tension, and a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter. It makes for a quick read, true, and Gone Tomorrow was definitely decorating the bestseller lists when it came out a little more than a year ago, but it’s the junk food of the literature banquet. If Child started out giving us the gourmet version of a thriller, now he was writing the equivalent of a fast-food burger.

Gone Tomorrow starts when Reacher is riding a subway car in Manhattan and sees a woman who shows all the signs of being a suicide bomber. From there, it lurches into an investigation of terrorism in which Child is taken into the confidence of several different law enforcement agencies and tasked with averting an enormous threat to the United States almost single-handedly. Reacher promises to get the job done, no matter what it takes.

Gone Tomorrow improves as it goes along, but the whole novel feels like Child has reached the limits of what he can do with Reacher. He’s an excellent character with an interesting background, and his military knowledge never fails to add great color to strongly plotted books, but based on the evidence of Gone Tomorrow, I would say that it’s time for him to go into retirement.

Perhaps that’s why I broke my habit of years and did not purchase a signed copy of the 2010 Reacher novel, but instead got on the waiting list at the library for my shot at it. I may reverse that decision, because 61 Hours is a fine book, a return to form for Child – maybe even as good as some of the earliest in the series. It is so good for many reasons, including its unexpected and unresolved ending; Reacher’s failure to have no-strings-attached sex with the nearest available female; and Reacher’s seeming cluelessness this time around, as opposed to his usual secret inside knowledge that allows him and him alone to solve the mystery. Certainly it’s not the fairly lame device of counting down from 61 hours until the climax.

The story is set in South Dakota in the middle of the winter. I’ve been in South Dakota at that time of year, and I assure you that the cold there is nothing to mess with. Reacher, who usually manages to get himself to southern climes during the winter months, is completely unprepared for the arctic air and the far below zero windchills. The weather plays an important role in this book, and it’s actually nice to see that Reacher struggles with it, a lot. He’s also in a place where his lack of wheels is a serious problem; he can’t always get to where he’s needed in the blink of an eye, and he can’t take care of everything with a single well-placed punch. It’s refreshing to see that Reacher is human after all.

Reacher winds up in South Dakota because a bus he’s on crashes in the middle of a blizzard, and he has no way to move on until a replacement bus gets there – which won’t be for several days. All of the motels and hotels in town are at capacity because it’s visiting day at the new federal prison, so the passengers have to be fobbed off on town residents. All of the passengers are clearly harmless, elderly people on a group trip to see Mount Rushmore at a time of year when no one else wants to go, which is why they can afford it. Reacher is the anomaly, someone who saw a half-empty bus and made a private deal with the driver for a trip west. No one really wants to put up this rather suspicious character except for the Assistant Chief of Police, Andrew Peterson.

Not surprisingly for a Child thriller, Reacher gets involved in the murder case Peterson is investigating. As the bigger plot is revealed, Reacher uses his remaining military connections to figure out exactly what’s going on at that abandoned Air Force site just outside town where a bunch of bikers are dealing methamphetamine. Even more, Reacher becomes integral to the protection of a federal witness to a meth sales transaction.

What I found most notable about this book, though, is that Child has returned to a strong style and method of storytelling. Perhaps he has been reading Robert B. Parker’s Spenser mysteries, because he tells a good portion of his story through dialogue, a technique Parker honed to perfection. Advancing a plot substantially through dialogue is much harder than you might imagine, but Child does it well, in much crisper fashion than his previous books. Chapters and paragraphs have heft here, and the “instant bestseller” format of Gone Tomorrow is – well, gone today. 61 Hours is a much better book.

61 Hours ends in a cliffhanger, with the promise of a new novel coming out October 19, 2010. That’s a much shorter gap between thrillers for Child than usual, which makes me all the more curious about what October will bring. I’m glad I didn’t give up on Child after Gone Tomorrow, and I’m glad there will be a new thriller from Child’s pen in a mere three months.