Worth Dying For
Lee Child
Delacorte Press, 2010
ISBN 978-0-385-34431-9
400 pages; $28.00

Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers are made for gulping. There’s no point in trying to savor the prose, which isn’t much made for savoring in any event. Child writes in such a manner that the story is essentially transmitted directly to your brain. The hours you spend reading Worth Dying For will simply rush by.

Reacher was in jeopardy at the end of Child’s last book, 61 Hours, published earlier this year (reviewed here), but Child spends fairly little time explaining how Reacher escaped from what seemed certain death. Oh, the explanation is there, all right, but it’s delivered with Reacher’s trademark laconicism. Reacher gets enmeshed in his new adventure too fast to make dwelling on the past, even the recent past of a day or two earlier, at all reasonable.

In this new thriller, Reacher is stranded in farm country in western Nebraska. It takes almost nothing for him to get involved in local problems; all he needs to do is drive a drunken physician to the aid of a woman who has been beaten by her husband. But there is so much subtext in the drinking, the physician’s reluctance to help the woman, and the woman’s beating that Child quickly has us hip-deep in the story of a local transportation company that hauls crops to market during the summer and fall, but carries more dangerous – and much more lucrative – cargo during the winter months. The men who own the company terrorize the town into silence, sure that something is going on but not knowing what, and completely unwilling to ask any awkward questions. And the nearest law of any significance is 60 miles away at the nearest state police outpost.

Reacher is the same man we’ve met before: nothing stops him; he is nearly superhuman. And he is never caught by surprise, no matter what the circumstances. It’s getting to be so extreme that you think Reacher is going to start wearing brightly colored tights and a cape. And Reacher seems to have less and less trouble killing or maiming, to the point where I became distinctly uncomfortable reading some portions of this book. I can’t quite understand why Reacher isn’t in prison. Even though he does always fight on the side of the angels, murder is murder.

But perhaps I think too much. You’re clearly not supposed to do too much thinking as you read this book. Child takes no real trouble to hide the big secret in this story, that is, what the dangerous cargo is. The identity of the bad guys is never in doubt for a second. The only real mystery is how exactly Reacher is going to defeat the evil running the town without getting any of the good guys killed; no whys, no maybes, not buts, just a how. Still, the “how” is the fun of reading a Child thriller, and this book is, ultimately, great fun.