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