No Plan B

Six-feet-five-inches-tall, 250-pound ex-MP Reacher witnesses a killing masqueraded as a suicide: a hooded man pushes a woman in front of a bus and runs off with her purse. Reacher pursues him, someone pursues him, and the bloodletting starts. Reacher doesn’t know why the killing happened or why someone is chasing him, but he won’t give up until he finds out. Two other narratives interweave with Reacher’s: a runaway 15-year-old travels to meet a father he’s never known, and a middle-aged criminal hunts for the man who supplied a defective liver to his son when he needed a transplant. Neither of these subordinate plots has enough interest to maintain it over the long haul, so there’s padding, and the main story line, of Reacher on the hunt, is cookie-cutter stuff—all the juice seems squeezed out of the series by this time. The franchise has had a long run: this is the 27th Jack Reacher thriller (after Better Off Dead), and the third coauthored by brothers Lee and Andrew. Perhaps it’s time to hang up the gloves.