Die Trying (Jack Reacher)

Jack Reacher, walking down a street in Chicago and stopping to help a woman struggling with her dry cleaning, gets caught up in kidnapping, terrorism, torture, murder and a militia bent on seceding from the United States.

He and Holly Johnson – an FBI agent – find themselves being shipped hundreds of miles in the back of a truck. They have precious few clues with which to figure out where they’re headed, why and what’s in store for them. The FBI meanwhile will stop at nothing to get back one of their own, but it takes dogged legwork on their part to track her down. And – is there a traitor on the inside? And what do the bad guys want with Holly Johnson anyway?

This story is compelling. You can’t stop turning the pages. Jack Reacher, a combination of Superman, the Lone Ranger and Sherlock Holmes, makes for an escapist read, about as much as I’m willing to tolerate in a thriller, but Child’s terse style and endless inventiveness, both in plotting and in Reacher’s cool doping out of the intentions of those around him and cooler execution of his plans, make for great reading.

I like Reacher’s knowledge of everything military. At one point, trying to guess the arrival of possible rescue, he knows he will have to wait for at least three hours because in the Army, nothing happens in less than three hours. I like his decision about how long to wait to see if a guard he’s escaped from will follow him – six minutes, and why that is. I like his ability to feel around in a pitch black space and determine a vehicle is military because he can feel the paint is matte rather than glossy. I like his ability to manipulate a militia member by appearing to buy into his black-helicopters-and-the-UN paranoia, and his ability to psych out a dog chasing him. You get this on just about every page.

And you can’t help but liking his Colossus-like stature in a fight, or his sniper-champion ability to hit the long shot at the last minute when everything rides upon it.

Heroine Holly Johnson is no slouch either; she displays a Reacher-like ability to think fast and stay a step ahead, relentlessly and ingeniously plots to escape from her imprisonment, and is a tough gal in a fight. She’s one of the better female action figures I’ve read in fiction.

There are some of the usual thriller flaws; the bad guys leave Reacher alive way too many times after he proves how dangerous he is. Bugt overall, I enjoy all the books in this series.

On a bright sunny day in Chicago, a woman is going to bring in her clothes to a dry cleaner. Since she is limping and is on crutches, Jack Reacher wants to help her. What he doesn’t know is that this woman is being followed and before you know it, he, along with the woman, is kidnapped by four thugs.

Once inside the van, Reacher learns that the woman that is kidnapped is Holly Johnson, an FBI agent. The kidnappers aren’t saying why they decided to kidnap this woman and Reacher isn’t getting any answers right away. It seems that neither one is going to get out of this alive.

This is the beginning of Die Trying by Lee Child. I can’t help but say from the start that this is the best book I’ve read by Child since I started reading the books in order. I like the way Child builds the tension in the story as we slowly learn who the kidnappers are and what they are going to do.

There are a lot of layers that are peeled away in the story and each layer builds more suspense and adds to the plot. There are a lot of surprises along the way as a result. I thought it was creative that we see the kidnappers connection to a bigger group and what the group represented. It does come right out of the headlines that you read in the newspapers and it was a great way to make a connection that built up the suspense even more.

Holly Johnson was not only an FBI agent but she was tough as well, even under the worst of circumstances. Child built a great character here and you knew she was not helpless although having Reacher there as a protector even in dire circumstances made the book even better.

What can you say about Reacher. He’s the one who still has to play the hero and of course, that means being a sniper and stopping this insane group of radicals who hate the government. There is a lot that he has to deal with throughout the story and each part of the plot involves him solving one problem before another one comes up right after that.

I had no problem with the point of view changing throughout the story as it switched to the FBI agents looking for Holly to the kidnappers and the group. It was a great way to add tension to the story since you didn’t know what the ultimate role the FBI would play in the story as well.

Compared to One Shot and Running Blind, this is my favorite Lee Child novel and I would easily give it five stars. I’l be anxious to see how the other ones are after reading this one.

I am reading the Jack Reacher novels in order, so "Die Trying" is my second one. In this book, Lee Child improved on his first effort ("Killing Floor") by creating a female character who is more than just a sex partner for his main hero, Jack Reacher. The female cop in "Killing Floor" frustrated me, because she stood around passively waiting to be carried out of danger by Jack Reacher. But Holly Johnson, the female FBI agent in "Die Trying," does a fair amount of courageous, skilled fighting against the bad guys, even though she is hampered by a pre-existing knee injury. She wins the admiration of all the male cops in the story. Holly is altogether a better developed, and more likeable, character than the female lead in "Killing Floor." On the other hand, I found the love scene between Holly and Jack in "Die Trying" to be improbable. Their coupling takes place under circumstances that I believe are extremely unlikely to allow for sexual arousal, at least on the woman's part. Specifically, Jack Reacher had just dug a six-foot-deep, six-foot-long, and three-foot-wide hole in the dirt, using a hand shovel, to bury a crucifixion victim, with Holly and about a million flies watching him. Jack must have been utterly filthy, I doubt the flies left the area immediately after the body was buried, and I certainly could not have gotten past the disgust and shock of seeing the body as quickly as Holly must have, in order to be ready for sex with Jack just then. I recommend that Child seek some advice from a female editor, to improve upon his scenes between Jack Reacher and the women in his novels.

One of the strengths of a Lee Child novel, IMO, is his detailed descriptions of processes the reader is unlikely to know anything about. In "Killing Floor" it was the process of counterfeiting US currency, which I thought Child handled extremely well. In this book, "Die Trying," Child explains the capabilities and drawbacks of several different weapons and kinds of ammo, and writes in detail about all the things a sniper has to adjust for when s/he is planning to hit a target that is 1,000 yards away. These include gravity, the curvature of the earth, and the shooter's own breathing and heartbeat. Most of this is interesting, but I got impatient with the amount of detail Child wrote into his discussion of things I think should be obvious to a person of average intelligence -- for example, that wind direction and speed will affect the trajectory of a bullet. I felt this should have been trimmed down a bit, although I didn't have a big problem with skimming over those parts.

I was able to guess the answers to some of the mysteries from the first clue or two Child gave, but others remained mysteries to me until the answers were explained by the characters in the book. Overall, this book provides several hours of great entertainment. If you like a lot of action, a hero who is able to employ psychological manipulation as well as his fists and weapons to fight the bad guys, and solving mysteries along the way, I recommend you read this.

I have started the process of reading the entire Jack Reacher series. Last year I read Killing Floor (reacher #1). I have just finished reading this one, Die Trying (reacher #2), and I can now state emphatically and happily that I will put Tripwire (reacher #3) into my “2015 To-Be-Read” queue. I may not get to Tripwire for another six months or so, but I will definitely look forward to reading it.

PLOT: I enjoyed the plot, a rogue militia intent on rekindling the American Revolution with a crazy man leading the way. At first I felt the way Jack Reacher became involved in the adventure was a little bit contrived, but I eventually moved past those thoughts as the story unfolded. I am sure a nitpicker would challenge the verisimilitude of the plot, but as with most political and/or military thrillers, a reader must be willing to suspend disbelief and except the story world as the author presents it. If you are willing and/or capable of suspending your disbelief, then I think you will enjoy the plot and the nuances the author brings to it.

PROTAGONIST: Jack Reacher is an enjoyable lead character. He borders on superhero capabilities, but the author never quite crosses into that totally unbelievable territory. Reacher is very capable — seemingly more capable than 99.99 percent of the population — but still given a modicum of human frailty… just enough to keep him from being an over the top super hero.

THE VILLAIN: I thought Beau Borden was an excellent villain. Smart, ruthless, and crazy. Just the right mix of personality traits that creates an excellent adversary.

SUPPORTING CAST: Some reviewers felt that there were too many other characters in the story, but I didn’t feel that way. The femme fatale, Holly Johnson, never quite materialized in my mind’s eye. For whatever reasons, I never felt she had much depth. Since I intuitively knew Jack Reacher would not be involved with her past the end of this story, I guess I just considered her a throw-away character from page one and never paid close attention to the nuances of her personality. Dissimilar to James Bond movies, where you also know the women are only temporary, in this book you don’t have the ability to ogle and appreciate the physical attraction of the femme fatale, or at least the author didn’t write the character in that manner. Holly Johnson would be a distant also-ran if compared to Honey Rider, Pussy Galore, Domino, Plenty O’Toole, Tiffany Case, or just about any other Bond woman.

THE WRITING: The writing is very good, easy to read, easy to follow. My only complaint would be too much detailed description. When it comes to describing characters, the author gives the reader a few traits and then lets the reader’s imagination take it from there… Which is what I tend to enjoy. However, when the author’s starts describing rooms or geography or something technical, he goes into long and laborious descriptions that stretch into multiple long paragraphs. I know that some readers would probably enjoy this type of in-depth description, but I found many of them to be tedious and I learned to skim past them.

SUMMARY: I enjoyed this story. I enjoyed Jack Reacher as the protagonist. I enjoyed Beau Borden as the villain. I found most of the supporting cast to be believable. And I enjoyed the plot and its resolution. As I said upfront, I will definitely be adding the third installment in the Jack Reacher series to my reading queue.

Lee Child can weave an interesting tale about Jack Reacher but may drive readers who are familiar with proper sentence structure and use of punctuation to the brink. I know that’s the case for me. I purchased the entire Jack Reacher series of books after seeing the first season of the series. I never would have read so many of his books if I hadn’t already paid for them. I have often wondered why, with all the money that Lee Child must have brought in from his writing, he can’t seem to afford a staff who will proofread and correct the many mistakes throughout his books. Same goes for his publisher. I held onto hope with each successive book that he might learn something about writing and make his books easier to read. I hoped, with the addition of his brother on the last couple, that the books would improve but seemed to get only worse. Sometimes, 2 whole pages of back-and-forth banter are written with nothing to occasionally let you know who is speaking, so multiple readings may be needed at times to sort it out. I think almost all, if not all, of the pages have sentences with commas where none are needed, periods where commas are needed, clauses used as sentences, and a new paragraph starting from a clause that belongs in the previous sentence of the preceding paragraph. As I said, hard to read if you understand basic sentence structure. There are often times where I wish Lee had done one iota of research to get facts right. I refer to passages in the stories where it was apparent that Lee Child had no experience or knowledge; I guess, more or less, the writing is off the top of his head. Some problems are: 1: He thinks the flashing emergency lights of vehicles in the western states are the same as in much of the New England states (blue on fire trucks and red on police). 2: He didn’t know what the average shoe size in America is actually 10 ½ (stating it as 9) 3: He thinks a large man like Jack Reacher would have what Lee evidently thinks of as a large foot size of 11, instead of something closer to 14 or 15 (I am 6’1” and wear a 13.) I assume Lee has a small foot. 4: Lee has never been near a fast-moving train, thinking there is violent ground movement when the train is even over a mile away and hurricane force winds near one traveling 60 mph. 5: He seems to think that all gas stations and quick marts sell khaki pants and various shirts, packs of socks, and underwear. 6: Jack Reacher can knock anyone unconscious and very often dead with one punch. I can remember only a couple times when it took two. 7: He thinks face bones will “shatter” from a Jack Reacher punch and can knock out a gorilla or even an elephant. Jack also never has injuries to his hand or elbow from such amazing blows. 8: Jack Reacher’s hands are said to be as large as a dinner plate and his fists as large as Thanksgiving turkeys…really? Yes, his books are hard to read for these and other reasons caused by lack of oversight by his publisher and lack of staff. Please, I hope never to find out he has a staff that lets this stuff through. Good storyteller, other than the lack of research on details and no idea as to sentence/paragraph structure..

Rating would be five for the story. Won't buy future books