Long-running series usually follow a familiar trajectory. The author hits his stride within the first three or four books, then they gradually decline, though faithful readers keep on buying them in the hope of finding the magic again. This did not seem the case with Child until his disappointing 12th novel Nothing to Lose. The pages turned quickly enough but there was something mechanical about the book, as if the author was becoming bored with his creation. One remarkable and refreshing aspect of the series, Child's unfashionable respect for the American military, seemed to have been soured by a new, all too fashionable obsession with the Iraq war and a bizarre idea about legions of deserters.
His new book (No. 1 on the bestseller list at the time of writing) marks a partial return to form, despite a higher than usual gore quotient, and plot twists that can seem determined more by the need for set-pieces — fights, interrogations, etc — than logic. It starts with a gripping scene as Reacher spots an apparent suicide bomber on the New York subway, and there were many subsequent chapters which prompted my heart to pound as if I'd just sprinted for a bus.
Unfortunately, Gone Tomorrow is again marred by Child's apparent conversion to the bien pensant politics all too common in the literary world of New York (where he now lives). The book is full of paranoid blather about the Patriot Act: like many half-stoned college kids and staffers at the Left-wing magazine the Nation, Child has been persuaded that this post 9/11 legislation has given birth to a terrifying national security state whose agents routinely make people disappear. (More surprisingly, but perhaps as destructive to readers' willingness to suspend disbelief, Child seems to imagine al-Qaeda is a kind of equal-opportunity criminal organisation, like Ian Fleming's Spectre, which happily employs infidel mercenaries and gorgeous mini-skirted seductresses.) It would be a shame if the Reacher books were never again to be as perfect as they once seemed. Like Reacher himself, I shall "hope for the best and plan for the worst" — and keep on buying them.
