No Plan B, A Jack Reacher Novel, Lee Child, Andrew Child, authors, Scott Brick, narrator.
Once again, in his rather aimless wanderings, Jack Reacher either finds troubles or trouble finds him. Honorable and compassionate, in his own odd way, he responds as if he was always personally involved with the strangers he witnesses being abused; he always steps in to help them. This time, in Gerrardsville, a small town in Mississippi he has just wandered into, he witnesses the murder of a woman. She is casually pushed under the wheels of a bus by a cold-blooded killer who then steals her purse. Reacher sees the entire tragedy and follows the killer. After he catches and subdues him, he looks into the trash bag holding the purse and sees an envelope sticking out with a name on it. Before he can investigate further, a car pulls up with the killer’s accomplice. After a brief confrontation, Reacher is left for dead. Of course he isn’t, because the series would end! However, the envelope he spied becomes the key to the mystery, and Reacher becomes obsessed with finding out everything he can about the murdered woman and the murderer. For almost the entire book, the reader is kept confused and guessing.
When Reacher comes to, he calls the police, but they promptly close the investigation, disregarding Reacher’s statements entirely about the crime. They rule it a suicide. Reacher knows it was not, and with Detective Harewood’s quiet cooperation, since he happens to believe Reacher and not his superiors, Reacher begins to investigate the crime. Harewood cannot disobey orders; he must drop the case, but Reacher does not have to, and he continues, sometimes with Harewood’s help, to solve this crime, and others related to it, as well. What seemed like a case of murder, grows far more complicated. A death from an overdose, a prisoner release, a runaway, all conspire to make the story more mysterious. Why was Angela St. Vrain murdered? Why were bodies piling up? What information did Angela have that was so dangerous that it cost her and others their lives?
Before long, this reader was “at sea”, thoroughly confused about the book’s plot. What was it really about? Was it about a drug war? Was it about corruption in prisons or law enforcement? Was it about foster care neglect? How was human trafficking, sex slavery, organ stealing, and sexual identity, involved? Were all of these problems part of the developing mystery? There was so much violence, and it was often truly barbaric. Basically, as all of these disparate threads were introduced, I was hard pressed to figure out what the real mystery was, at times. The threads simply did not knit together smoothly, and although the story was interesting and the action palpable, it was also less satisfying than the previous novels in the series.When all was said and done, a woman named Angela is murdered, a young man named Kyle dies, and a young boy named Jed runs away from his foster home. Somehow, the lives of these three people are connected, in a convoluted way, to the Minerva Correction Facility in Winsom, Mississippi. You can trust Reacher to find out how; the reader will not do it alone.