Night School

An Amazon Best Book of November 2016: Last year’s Reacher book, Make Me, ended on a minor medical cliffhanger which I, for one, was looking forward to seeing resolved this Fall. But author Lee Child isn’t giving up the goods so easily. Instead of picking up where that book left off, he takes Reacher back in time to 1996. Still in the Army, Reacher is coming off a medal-earning career triumph when he is sent back to school. His three-man class (Reacher, a CIA guy and an FBI agent) however, is a front for a secret mission: figure out the plot behind a message intercepted in Germany which reads “the American wants 100 million dollars.” The good news for fans is that all the familiar elements show up in Night School: the words “Reacher says nothing” appear at least half a dozen times, and as usual, Reacher combines mechanical precision and brute strength to beat up bad guys with a degree of violence falling somewhere between Bruce Lee and a backhoe. Best of all, fan-favorite Sergeant Frances Neagley makes a welcome reappearance, riding shotgun with Reacher as he hunts for his quarry. Is the plot as robust and impressive as our hero? Not entirely, but readers will barely notice. Twenty-one books into this series it’s clear that what makes them work as well as they do is the joy of watching Reacher’s extraordinary powers of deduction working in tandem with his remarkable ass-kicking abilities. On that front, Child delivers as usual. --Vannessa Cronin, The Amazon Book Review