'THE MIDNIGHT LINE'......MORE BAD GUYS FIND OUT THEY DON'T KNOW JACK.....

The Midnight Line by Lee Child (2017)   Having recently done a rant about best-selling authors who package their books like Oscar Meyer hot dogs, we're pleased to stand up and applaud Lee Child's Jack Reacher series.......

              Child's wonderful creation, a physically huge and powerful ex-Army major who wanders around the country as a valiant knight-errant, is always welcome on the BQ bookshelf.....

             Even more welcome........Lee Child's willingness to bend and twist his character's adventures in surprisingly different directions.......even at the risk of angering Child's (and Reacher's) fan base.

             In other words, Jack Reacher ain't no Stephanie Plum........you never know where he'll end up or what he'll encounter.

             Admittedly, the BQ, like millions of other Reacher-creatures, is most partial to the standard Reacher template.......which finds Jack hitchhiking into a heartland Middle-Of-Freakin'-Nowhere and stumbling upon an evil conspiracy and an army of goons who need immediate Reacher-izing.

            .....this involves having the hoods' heads and other body parts tenderized by Reacher's thunderous fists.....

             "The Midnight Line" certainly starts off that way, but gradually turns into a much deeper and sadder examination of the American drug epidemic and the tragic, damaged lives of veterans returning from our endless Middle East wars.

              Child doles out only small portions of what we'd call Reacher Red Meat for the base......(you know the scenes we mean, Reacher out-badassing a badass and disabling some of his thuggish minions....).  The principal villain here remains a remote, generally ignored presence.......by the time he finally meets his long overdue Reacher-ization, so many other more emotional moments have occurred, that he's tossed off as an afterthought.

              Which we didn't mind at all. Because the heart of the book lies in Reacher's haunting and irrevocably sad interaction with another character altogether. (Here's where we need to stop talking, lest we veer into spoilers......)

              For anyone who only knows Jack Reacher from the woeful, ludicrous film portrayals by that diminutive cult Kool-Aid drinker Tom Cruise, put those out of your mind at once.......at start reading the books........Reacher is one Army officer who's always a 4 star hero to us...(****)