Gone TomorrowA Reacher Novel

Another brilliant potboiler featuring the most thoughtful protagonist in thrillerdom
It takes serious talent to create a finely tuned potboiler, and even seriously skilled authors can get sloppy after trotting out the same protagonist for a dozen outings. Which is why Lee Child's well-crafted Gone Tomorrow is a kind of minor miracle. The 13th novel in Child's Jack Reacher series impresses with its elegant misdirection, cleanly drawn characters and unremarkable but expertly-deployed prose.

The story begins when Child's stalwart hero intervenes in an apparent suicide bombing on the New York subway. (Having a run-in with Jack Reacher is as unwise as befriending Angela Lansbury on Murder, She Wrote, it seems.) From there he entangles himself in an impressively orchestrated plot, the scope of which keeps surprising, even at the halfway point. Reacher is thoughtful to the point of comedy; the book is written in the first person, and Reacher never makes a decision without describing how he thinks each option might turn out. It's possible that, on the page, this comes across as somewhat dry — it's a cinch to imagine how the abridged edition ended up being less than half as long as the unabridged — but Dick Hill's narration is pitch-perfect, turning even the simplest declaration into an interesting character moment or avuncular punchline.