Without Fail

Lee Child

Average Rating 8/10 (1 Review)

Jack Reacher walks alone. No job, no ID, no last known address. But he never turns down a plea for help. Now a woman tracks him down, because she needs a hand with her new job.

Her task? Protecting the Vice-President of the United States. From someone threatening to kill him.

And so Reacher, with nothing but his toothbrush and the clothes he stands up in, enters a very exclusive club at the heart of Washington power: the offices of the United States Secret Service. Here he must literally put himself in the line of fire, pitting his native cunning, surly charm and instinctive but controlled violence against the wiliness of bureaucrats and the ghosts from his own past -as well as the brutal ruthlessness of the mystery assassin.

Without Fail is Lee Child's sixth thriller, another brilliantly plotted, romantic and nail-bitingly exciting story featuring Jack Reacher a hero whose toughness, coolness and sheer animal magnetism just grow more irresistible with every book.

Review by Chrissi (010702) Rating (8/10)

Review by Chrissi
Rating 8/10
I have never read a Lee Child novel before, so perhaps picking up the sixth Jack Reacher novel may not provide a great deal of background to his work, but it actually worked quite well. Jack Reacher is a drifter, a man who stays well away from the system, and does his own thing. The story opens with him being picked up by musicians who ask him to stay with them until they have been paid because the kind of places that they play in are notoriously bad at paying what they owe. Here, we see him fend off some goons who want to tell him to leave and not annoy their employers any more. They get rather more than they bargained for, as you may imagine.

Jack, as a drifter, keeps very little with him, and when a secret service agent needs to track him down, there is little to go on. They want him because there is a threat against the man they protect, and it may be internal. As an outsider, he may see lapses in their security that they have missed. Jack agrees to investigate the security and drops from sight, only to surface with evidence of several breaches in their security cordon.

The story, however, does not end there as he sticks around, becoming personally involved, and when things take an unexpected turn, he has to sort it all out.

This is an indestructible action man, like Dirk Pitt, he has one of those maverick attitudes. I half expected lots of really cheesy bits, you know, jaw twitching, eyes glinting, drawling, and stuff like that, but after finishing the book, I cannot remember any majorly cheesy moments, so I have to admit that has got to be a plus. I enjoyed the plot, it was well constructed, you were never sure of the direction his investigation was going to take, and it was well paced. I liked Jack Reacher, even though he is almost a caricature of a wandering loner, he could almost be a TV series hero like the littlest hobo, only a man.
Chrissi (1st July 2002)