The Affair
Lee Child
Delacorte Press, 2011
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-0-385-344326
416 pages; $28.00

Lee Child has taken a different approach to his series character, Jack Reacher, the former military cop who now wanders about the United States, earning enough money to get by and carrying no luggage except his portable toothbrush. In The Affair, Child tells us how Reacher got to be Reacher, going back in time to his last case while he was still an Army major.

It’s 1997, and the Army is in the midst of covert action in Kosovo, sending Rangers out of the Fort Kelham military base near Carter Crossing, Mississippi on a regular basis. The mission is secret, but the town knows something is going on, because Rangers are in and out of the local bars and stores – indeed, the small town depends on them to keep going. The problem is that there’s been a grotesque murder: a woman has had her throat slit, been drained of blood, and then posed in an alley as if she bled out there. Worse, and unknown to Reacher when he’s assigned to the case, she’s not the first.

The Army is concerned that someone on the base committed the murders. It sends an investigator directly to the base to conduct an investigation from the inside, but it also sends Reacher to Carter Crossing under cover, asking him to find out from that perspective just what’s going on. Reacher, who has spent his entire adult life in the Army, has no clothing suitable for an undercover mission. He purchases a shirt, a pair of pants, some underwear – and that famous portable toothbrush – and he’s set to go. Reacher doesn’t buy more than the clothes he wears, leading him to the pattern he observes in all the other books: when a shirt or a pair of pants gets dirty or torn, he simply chucks them and buys new. It’s a lot cheaper than having a wardrobe and a place to keep it, after all.

Once in Mississippi, though, the police chief – a stunningly gorgeous woman who used to be a Marine – makes Reacher for an undercover cop almost the second he sets foot on the streets of Carter Crossing. She all but orders him out of town until he comes up with some information she missed, at which point they become a team in most ways, even though they have opposite purposes: she wants the murderer to be on the Army base and not her problem, while Reacher wants to find that the murderer has no relationship to the Army whatsoever.

The investigation goes forward in the same, smart way most of Reacher’s cases progress, including the random violence that seems a part of his life. And the random violence is followed by some carefully planned violence in which Reacher’s lightning quick reactions save him from an ugly death, more than once. And Reacher has the romance – or, at least, the hot sex – that he seems to find waiting for him wherever he goes.

The origins of superheroes (and Reacher really is a superhero, even if he doesn’t wear tights and a cape) are not always the best tales, but Child has turned out a strong entry in the series with this novel. The reader familiar with Reacher gets the delight of recognition when Reacher does the sort of thing he always does, seeing how this or that habit of his started up. And readers who haven’t encountered Reacher before would find this novel a great place to start. It’s a good story, well told, precisely what a reader hopes to find in a thriller.