Books of 2024: Week 16 - Tripwire

Cody checks in on Jack Reacher.

TRIPWIRE by Lee Child

I have read seven of author Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels (plus a handful of short stories) in the last couple of years, and for some reason I found Tripwire – which was the third book in the series to be published, but currently lands at number seven in the chronology – to be the most difficult to get through. The Kindle edition I was reading had a page count over 500... and the story just didn’t warrant having so many pages dedicated to it. Child has a tendency to pack his books with unnecessarily long descriptive passages, and Tripwire is overflowing with them. He must enjoy writing them, but they can be a slog to read, and in the end I was left feeling that if you were to remove the unneeded information from this book, it would have been almost half the length it is. The story would have benefited from that.

Things get off to a promising start. No longer an Army MP, the Reacher character is in drifter mode. He has made his way down to Key West and now the guy, who was already a hulking, muscular beast, is in the best shape of his life, thanks to his day job of digging swimming pools with a shovel. (At night, he’s working as a bouncer at a strip club.) His peace is disrupted when a private investigator shows up looking for him, with a couple henchmen-types following close behind. When he discovers that the private investigator has been murdered by the henchmen, Reacher decides to figure out what’s going on – and find out why people are looking for him. The trail leads him to New York City, where he learns that his former commanding officer Leon Garber (a character featured in several of the books that come earlier in the chronology) has passed away. The funeral reunites him with Garber’s daughter Jodie, who Reacher felt an inappropriate attraction to back in the days when they previously knew each other, when she was 15 and he was 24. Now they’re both in their 30s, so she becomes his love interest in this book. And once Reacher and Jodie are together, the book starts to crawl its way through its middle stretch.

Before he died, Garber was doing some investigative work as a favor to an elderly couple, and the "tripwires" he set off during his investigation caught the attention of the lead villain. Leading to what happened in Key West. The villain is a businessman called "Hook" Hobie, who received the Hook nickname because he lost a hand (and was caught in a fire) during the Vietnam War. His lost hand was replaced by a hook prosthetic. Hook is a very bad man, who thinks nothing of destroying lives – or even of torturing and/or murdering people in his office in the World Trade Center. (This book was first published in 1999.) His levels of scumbaggery are over-the-top, and he almost has what it takes to be a James Bond villain, if only he weren’t operating in a book that’s so dull for so many of its pages.

Things get more interesting when we enter the second half and Hook starts taking hostages so he can make moves that are necessary for him to be able to escape New York City before anyone finds out his secrets. Child seemed to have fun drawing things out as Hook torments his victims while Reacher and Jodie are conducting the investigation that will eventually lead them to Hook. We’re desperate for Reacher to find Hook and rescue the people he’s holding captive – but it’s all happening in New York City, and Child has Reacher and Jodie following leads to Missouri and Hawaii. So, obviously, Reacher isn’t going to cross paths with Hook as soon as the reader wants him to.

There’s a decent mystery regarding Hook’s Vietnam record and the elderly Hobie parents (the people Garber was dealing with), who believe their son has been a prisoner-of-war for all these decades. The reader is likely to solve the mystery long before Reacher does, though.

Then there’s some pretty cool climactic action. I had read this book before, more than ten years ago, and the only things I remembered about it were the character of "Hook" Hobie and a certain injury sustained by Reacher during the final moments. That proves there’s not much that’s particularly memorable about this book. It’s not terrible, there’s definitely some fun to be had while reading it... I just wish it had been more fun and a bit shorter, because there were some rough patches.