Make Me

Small Town Secrets

Make Me is Lee Child’s twentieth Jack Reacher novel. The six-foot five giant of a man, ex army intelligence, lives like a gypsy. He owns nothing but the clothes on his back and a toothbrush in his pocket.  When his clothes get too filthy he buys a new set and throws away the old. He is constantly on the move, and gets involved in all kinds of adventures he does nothing to seek, but does not avoid either. He has nowhere to go, and nothing to do, except, maybe, kill bad guys when they cross his path. He is a unique hero, which Tom Cruise could not quite nail in the only Jack Reacher movie made in 2012 (based on the 2005 novel One Shot) Still, another Reacher novel,  the terrific Never Go Back is being made into a film to be released next year.

Make Me has more violence than other Reacher books, which are by no means squeamish about bloodshed. It starts harmlessly enough, with Reacher getting off a train at a station called Mother’s Rest, because he is curious about the name. All he wants to do is walk around the wheat-growing town and find out the origin of the town’s peculiar name.

He runs into a woman called Michelle Chang, who is a detective, looking for her partner Keever, who came to Mother’s Rest and disappeared. The reader knows he has been killed, what has to be determined is why and by whom; also how Chang will solve the mystery all on her own.

She won’t be alone, obviously. Reacher offers help, for no reason but that he is the kind of guy who would. He is also intrigued by the sinister goings in the town and the overt hostility of the menfolk. That, and the odd fact that nobody knows why the town is called Mother’s Rest.

When Reacher is threatened with bodily harm, he cannot but fight back and leave some seriously damaged men in his wake. (His actions are justified thus: he is “a craftsman going about his business, calmly, using his natural born gifts.”)

Reacher and Chang (who casually jump into bed soon enough, though there are no steamy antics described), set out to find out what happened to Keever and somehow connect with a journalist, Westwood, who goes along for the ride to get a scoop and book rights for whatever can of worms is opened.

More violence is unleashed as the trio inch towards the truth. What they find is so horrifying, that the book leaves one a bit shaken. The overlong climax is not too interesting to read, but it seems to have been written with a screenplay adaptation in mind.

The plot is complex, the pace is unhurried, the dialogue laconic and the humour wicked. At one point, to test Reacher’s memory that may have been affected by a head injury, Chang makes him recite the Gettyburg Address when the are together in the bathroom. Westwood’s baffled reaction is priceless.

Make Me

By Lee Child

Publisher: Delacorte

Pages: 402