The Sentinel by Lee Child and Andrew Child (2020) We'll make no attempts to understand why Lee Child seems hellbent on on disappointing, aggravating and confounding the vast loyal audience for his Jack Reacher books.
Like "Blue Moon" the last Reacher adventure, (reviewed here on 3/6/20), the newest one's tedious, dumb and warps the character of Jack Reacher into somebody who's nothing like the Reacher we've come to know and love.
Aided and abetted by his brother Andrew, Child might well be on his way to cutting down the size of the Reacher fan base.
While we're not a hardcore 'Reacher-creature', one more book like this one and we may pass up the one after that......
Reacher comes to the aid of a small burg's I.T. guy who's become a loathed pariah after the town's entire computer systems collapse. You can tell how seriously this guy's hated because his coffee shop barista treats him rudely. Holy crapola!
This sap's not only out of luck, he's out of latte......
Even worse, whole carloads of thugs try to snatch him, which is when, of course, our boy Jack steps in to sort things out and kick some ass.
And the asses in question, as you may have already guessed, belong to Russian hackers, busily pursuing their ongoing mission to bring chaos to America.
We wish we could tell you that this whole 'ripped-from-the-headline' storyline comes off as breathless, exciting and designed to make you zip through the pages all night.
We zipped through the pages, sure enough.
But barely reading them, since the book bogs down into a lethally boring slog, with Reacher and the I.T. guy conducting an endless search for missing servers that will exonerate the I.T. guy, and incriminate the Russians.
One plus for all you die hard Reacher-ites.......the book throws in a couple of Russian villains that look like they were borrowed from a James Bond film.......a towering hulk who goes mano e mano with Jack and a woman minion who keeps a thin sharp blade hidden in her hair. (We suppose that replaced the poison knife hidden in shoes as standard equipment.....)
You'll have to decide if waiting for the expected Reacher punch-ups are worth sifting through all the useless, excess verbiage on display here.
For us, it's a 1 star effort (*). The lone star is only for the jumbo Russian thug and that nasty hair-knife lady.
SPOILER ALERT:
The barista's much nicer to the I.T. guy in the final pages........
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