Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
A Wanted Man
by Lee Child, Delacorte 2012
Reviewed by Larry Riggs
The seventeenth entry in Lee Child's Jack
Reacher series kept me interested throughout. I believe that this
is largely because most of the action is mental. Reacher, once a
military police officer and now a committed vagabond, is
hitchhiking across the country to Virginia, to meet a woman whom he
knows only as a voice on the telephone. Vagabonds can afford to be
both capricious and adventurous! In rural Nebraska, he is picked up
by a car in which two men and a woman are riding. The men say they
are on the way to Chicago, which suits Reacher. Before long, they
encounter a roadblock on the Interstate. A bit later, they
encounter another roadblock. Clearly, a serious crime has been
committed nearby, and the officers manning the roadblocks
apparently have a description which Reacher and his companions do
not fit. The woman in the car is completely silent, and the men
seem vaguely menacing. Reacher's mental detecting exercises begin
when he takes over the driving, and the woman, in the back seat,
begins blinking what seem to be signals to him in the rearview
mirror. Reacher deciphers her code and learns that she is the car's
owner and a captive. The men must have picked Reacher up in order
to deceive the roadblock officers. From there, the book progresses
through many twists and turns toward the conclusion, in which, as
always, Reacher shows both tactical brilliance and absolute
courage. Recommended highly.
- Larry Riggs is Professor of French at Butler University.