The Midnight Line

Reacher On The Rampage

The Midnight Line is the twenty-second book in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. The former military man, a big-built hulk with no fixed address but a very strong moral compass, lives a nomadic life with one set of clothes and a toothbrush. He goes where the mode of transport he has chosen takes him. But everywhere, there is a problem (read crime) he gets involved with, and once he does, he solves it—using both brain and brawn.

When this book begins, Reacher has been gently dumped by his current girlfriend (“You’re like New York City. I love to visit, but I could never live there,” her goodbye note reads), and quite uncharacteristically for him, he misses her. As he wistfully imagines what she must be doing, he gets on to a bus to go wherever it is going.

When casually strolling on the street when the bus takes a break, he passes a pawn shop and spots a West Point Ring. (West Point is an elite military academy in the US). A former graduate of the academy himself, he cannot imagine what kind of crisis must have forced an alumna to pawn a precious ring. So he sets out to hunt for the woman—it is a tiny female ring, engraved SRS 2005—and see if he can help her.

And once he starts asking questions about how the ring got in the window, he finds he has stepped on a hornet’s nest. Information from the pawn shop owner eventually leads him to a laundromat, whose owner, Arthur Scorpio, is the lynchpin of some kind of illegal drugs racket.

He finds that every link in the chain he cracks warns the next one, but even well-prepared for a Neanderthal man, the gangsters are no match for the one-man battering ram.

Reacher discovers that a private eye, neat and methodical ex-cop, Terry Bramall, is also on the same trail. He has been hired by the sister of the mysterious owner of the ring to trace her. Eventually, they join up, and find the young woman, uncovering in the process a trail of drugs, corruption and shocking apathy on the part of the American establishment towards former military personnel injured in the line of duty.

This book set in desolate towns is equal parts thrilling and moving. It shows the relatively soft, emotional side of Reacher, and ends on a somewhat hokey but still moving note. But when Lee Child’s all-American hero is on a rampage, he is at his tough and witty best.

The Midnight Line
By Lee Child
Publisher: Delacorte

Pages: 368 pages

Little Fires Everywhere

Perils Of Perfection

“Most communities just happen; the best are planned,” is the motto of the town called Shaker Heights, in Celeste Ng’s acclaimed second novel, Little Fires Everywhere.

In a clean and orderly town, with its perfectly manicured lawns, homes with coordinated paint jobs and matching trees, the first fire is lit by the arrival of a Bohemian photographer, Mia Warren and her teenage daughter Pearl.  The literal fires are, however, lit by the disgruntled Izzy Richardson, who is the black sheep of her family;  when the book opens, she has set her home on fire and disappeared.

The novel is set in the 1990s, when the Jerry Springer show on TV and pagers are the hot favourites among teenagers. The affluent Richardson family-- lawyer dad, journalist mom Elena and their four kids, Lexie, Trip, Moody and Izzy-- live happily, till Mia and Pearl appear to rent an apartment from Elena. They live like nomads, packing their meagre belongings into a small car and moving whenever Mia thinks she is done with a place. Their clothes are from thrift shops, their mismatched furniture from junkyards. Elena tries to do good and offers Mia a job as he cook and housekeeper, which she reluctantly accepts so as not to 

appear ungrateful.

Moody immediately befriends Pearl and she becomes like an extra kid in the house full of youngsters.  Meanwhile Izzy is besotted with Mia, and wishes her family was as laidback.

As the relationships between the kids get complicated, Elena starts to resent Mia and digs into her past—the book digressing into the birth of Pearl and the reason for Mia’s unsettled life. Meanwhile the two families end up on opposite sides of the town’s latest cause célèbre.  A childless white couple, the McCulloughs, take in a Chinese infant abandoned by her impoverished mother, Bebe.  But when she gets a job, she wants her child back—Mia supports her while Elena stands by her friend Linda McCullough, and her husband fights the case on their behalf in court. The Richardson’s believe they are not racist – Lexie has a black boyfriend—but scratch the surface and their hidden class and race prejudices surface. Only Izzy is surprisingly clear-sighted and vociferous, for which her family labels her as crazy.

Ng’s portrayal of shiny suburban Americana is sharp and satirical; she may not be too disparaging of the strictly regimented Shaker Heights, but her sympathies clearly lie with those who break out of set moulds, whether it’s Mia, her teacher and mentor Pauline Hawthorne, or the rebellious Izzy.

The book turned out to be a bestseller and news is that Reese Witherspoon has selected it for a Big Little Lies-style adaptation.   

Little Fires Everywhere

By Celeste Ng

Publisher:  Penguin

Pages: 352

The Word Is Murder

The Writer Investigates

A woman goes to an undertaker’s office to make arrangements for her own funeral. A few hours later she is found murdered in her home.

From this intriguing beginning, Anthony Horowitz constructs a gripping novlel--The Word Is Murder-- in which he plays a starring part. Horowitz is a bestselling author, who has written a Bond thriller,Trigger Mortis, a Sherlock Holmes mystery, The House Of Silk, his own very popular Alex Rider series for young adults among other novels, TV series and films. But, as his previous novel The Magpie Murders proved, he is adept at spinning complex suspense yarns with devilishly clever twists, and a tough-to-guess killer, even when he is staring the reader right in the face.

Disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, who has been consultant on a TV series written by Horowitz, now works as a consultant with the Metropolitan police. He is assigned the job of investigating the murder of Diana Cowper, the woman who planned her own funeral, down to the casket and music. Hawthorne is strapped for cash and approaches Horowitz to write a book about him working on the Cowper murder. He cheekily suggests a 50/50 split, which, of course, does not extend to his splitting bills for travel and meals.

The first problem for Horowitz is that Hawthorne is not in the least likeable, the second is that the book will work only if Hawthorne manages to solve the case. So, over the next few days, the writer follows the cop around like a sidekick and finds his life completely taken over. Hawthorne even disrupts—in a hilarious scene-- a crucial work meeting Horowitz is having with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson.

The dead woman’s son Damien, a successful star working in Hollywood, arrives with girlfriend and daughter in tow. He is, from all accounts, as ruthlessly ambitious as he is handsome. His mother may have had some enemies, like a theatre producer who conned her, the parents of a boy who was killed in an accident by Diana Cowper, and his twin brother severely maimed. 

Hawthorne is annoyingly rude, bigoted and invasive, but also a brilliant investigator; Horowitz who is proud of his own analytical skills is often left gobsmacked by the cop’s sharp mind.

The book is not just suspenseful but also witty, and gives a lot of insights into the world of creative people—success, failure, struggle, ambition, envy, despair. Who the killer turns out to be is not surprising, it’s the why and how that is truly enthralling.

The Word Is Murder

By Anthony Horowitz

Publisher: Cornerstone

Pages: 400

Enemy Of The State

Rapp On The Head

Vince Flynn, who created the character of CIA spy and assassin Mitch Rapp passed away leaving the fourteenth book—The Survivor-- in the series incomplete. Kyle Mills was assigned to complete this book and write two more. (It is a publishing trend now to keep bestselling characters alive, when the original writes dies.)

Enemy Of The State is the sixteenth book starring Mitch Rapp (in the film,American Assassin, Dylan O’Brien plays Rapp), who is legendary in espionage circles for having carried out many successful hits and also being virtually indestructible. He is a patriot and will go to any lengths to destroy enemies of the US and protect his country, for which he has the support of his boss, Irene Kennedy. Rapp lost his pregnant wife in an attack on his life and is just about settling down with his new flame Claudia (she has a back story to do with espionage too) and her daughter Anna, when he is thrown into a cauldron by American President, Joshua Alexander.

Saudi prince, Prince Talal bin Musaid, nephew of the old and toothless King Faisal gets mixed up with the ISIS. He is an entitled fool, who takes his position for granted. But he is spotted handing over money to an ISIS courier, and alarm bells ring in the US.  Meanwhile, Saudi Intelligence chief, Aali Nassar, is plotting and scheming a coup to seize control on the Middle East with the help of the ISIS head Mullah Sayid Halabi.

Alexander summons Rapp for a secret meeting and tells him to deal with the problem and prevent their post 9/11 alliance with the Saudis from being exposed. The problem is that he has to do it unofficially, so if he is caught or killed, the US would disown him. Rapp resigns from the CIA and forms his own rogue group with erstwhile Russian foe Grisha Azarov, former model and lover Donatella Rahn and gun-running sniper Kent Black; Claudia comes in as the logistics expert.

A lot of the action takes place in dusty South Sudan, taking in Iraq, Morocco, Monaco, Paris and Brussels as the gang rushes about trying to douse the fires Nassar has lit.  Nassar puts an old FBI investigator Joel Wilson on the job to trace Rapp, well aware that the man hates Rapp with a passion.

It is all fast-paced fun, if the racism can be tolerated; the book makes no bones about making the Americans look like the smartest, bravest people on the planet.

Enemy Of The State

By Vince Flynn & Kyle Mills

Publisher: Atria

Pages: 400

Tell Tale

Short And Wicked

After completing the multi-volume Clifton Chronicles, Jeffrey Archer comes out with Tell Tale, a collection on thirteen enjoyable short stories.

The first story, Who Killed the Mayor, is the best, and sets the tone for the others, in a few of which clever people get away with crime. In this story, a young Neapolitan detective is sent to an idyllic town in Campania to investigate the murder of a thuggish man who had threatened the peace and prosperity of the town. The problem for the cop is that everyone wants to confess to the murder, and since he knows how it was done, he is aware that they are all lying for some strange reason. The story has a delightfully wicked twist in the end.

There is a charming story, A Wasted Hour, in which an aspiring writer hitches a ride with a man, without recognising him as her icon; in Senior Vice President, a diligent banker is forced to go rogue when he is treated unfairly by the management. A trip to a Holocaust site causes the preset career of a rich student to veer of course in A Road to Damascus.

A Gentleman and A Scholar  is about  Shakespeare scholar who fights the chauvinism of her time to become the first female professor at Yale. The Holiday Of A Lifetime, has three alternative ending the reader can pick from.

There are a couple of flash fiction tales, in which Archer takes up the challenge of writing the exact number of words demanded.

He seems to have fun writing the stories—some of which are set in places he has been to and people he may have met—and the reader can zip throughTell Tale in a single sitting and put it back on the shelf with a smile.

Tell Tale

By Jeffrey Archer

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 288