No Plan B

“The meeting was held in a room with no windows.” And so, begins the latest instalment in Jack Reacher’s journey - one that despite following the well-trodden path of the series, is as fresh and tortuous as what preceded it. From the aforementioned meeting (more a prologue), held in the windowless room comes a dark tale. The significance of that meeting reveals itself later.

This time around our avenger finds himself in Colorado; a mute witness to the murder of a woman named Angela, pushed under the wheels of a moving bus. After dispatching the assailant, Reacher retrieves the dead woman’s items the assailant had tried to conceal in a black bin-liner.  It appears that the murdered woman worked at a correctional facility in Mississippi, one that had rooms without windows.

Having been a reader of these adventures for over twenty years, they act as an annual treat. Like the work of Alistair MacLean from my youth, there is a formula of sorts, but in that mechanism comes exhilaration where the familiar path is subverted into the darker machinations of the world, with vengeance from an avenger who works with compassion, but is able to brutalise in order to right the wrongs – “for the little girl in the wallet photo. Angela’s daughter. Who would now have to grow up without a mother,” and so Jack Reacher finds purpose.

With this, comes an adventure that traverses several States as Reacher travels from Colorado to Mississippi, introduces many characters, situations, some which are as violent [in a cathartic manner] as I’ve read in some time. There’s naturally a conspiracy of sorts, a tangled web with misdirection, malevolence with extreme prejudice in a plot that moves with rapid acceleration to a satisfying dénouement.

The Jack Reacher novels with their panoramic, neo-western vistas have often been described as cinematic. If we ignore the two screen adaptations, then No Plan B would easily fit into the Amazon Prime TV series due to its narrative velocity, and unrelenting pace. Despite being a novel of action, it provokes deep-thought as the reader embarks on the journey, one with a truly exhilarating climax.

Ian Chapman, who first discovered the work of MacLean for publisher William Collins once said - “Alistair thought of his novel writing as a formula. I think that's to diminish his ability.” After putting down No Plan B, I consider it apt to reflect Chapman’s sentiment to the work of Lee and Andrew Child.

Highly recommended because No Plan B is sheer adventure. And one to be read before it streams onto our flat screens.