Finished: Lee Child's "The Midnight Line"

Lee Child turned out another good, clever Jack Reacher novel in The Midnight Line.

As I've mentioned before, a book set in places I'm somewhat familiar with always endears itself to me. Much of this book took place in my hometown of Rapid City, so you know I was liking it. Even forays into Wyoming territory I'm familiar with added to its allure.

But you could set a novel taking place in my basement and it would still have to deliver a clever plot and intriguing characters to make it legit. This one did. How Child can make his 22nd Jack Reacher storyline so unique and interesting is beyond me.

From Amazon:

Reacher takes a stroll through a small Wisconsin town and sees a class ring in a pawn shop window: West Point 2005. A tough year to graduate: Iraq, then Afghanistan. The ring is tiny, for a woman, and it has her initials engraved on the inside. Reacher wonders what unlucky circumstance made her give up something she earned over four hard years. He decides to find out. And find the woman. And return her ring. Why not?

So begins a harrowing journey that takes Reacher through the upper Midwest, from a lowlife bar on the sad side of small town to a dirt-blown crossroads in the middle of nowhere, encountering bikers, cops, crooks, muscle, and a missing persons PI who wears a suit and a tie in the Wyoming wilderness.

The deeper Reacher digs, and the more he learns, the more dangerous the terrain becomes. Turns out the ring was just a small link in a far darker chain. Powerful forces are guarding a vast criminal enterprise. Some lines should never be crossed. But then, neither should Reacher.

It's a 7+ out of 10 on the Haugenometer, pretty much in line with the 4.3 of 5 by Amazonians and Goodreaders a 4.2.

A couple quotes I marked:

“You threatening me now?”
“More like the weather report. A public service. Like a tornado warning. Prepare to take cover.”  

 

“Billy was a hardscrabble country boy, maybe forty years old, lean and furtive, like a fox and a squirrel had a kid, and spent half the time baking it in the sun, and the other half beating it with a stick.”