Nothing to Lose (Jack Reacher, No. 12)

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Product Description
Two lonely towns in Colorado: Hope and Despair. Between them, twelve miles of empty road. Jack Reacher never turns back. It's not in his nature. All he wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets is big trouble. So in Lee Child’s electrifying new novel, Reacher—a man with no fear, no illusions, and nothing to lose—goes to war against a town that not only wants him gone, it wants him dead.

It wasn’t the welcome Reacher expected. He was just passing through, minding his own business. But within minutes of his arrival a deputy is in the hospital and Reacher is back in Hope, setting up a base of operations against Despair, where a huge, seething walled-off industrial site does something nobody is supposed to see . . . where a small plane takes off every night and returns seven hours later . . . where a garrison of well-trained and well-armed military cops—the kind of soldiers Reacher once commanded—waits and watches . . . where above all two young men have disappeared and two frightened young women wait and hope for their return.

Joining forces with a beautiful cop who runs Hope with a cool hand, Reacher goes up against Despair—against the deputies who try to break him and the rich man who tries to scare him—and starts to crack open the secrets, starts to expose the terrifying connection to a distant war that’s killing Americans by the thousand.

Now, between a town and the man who owns it, between Reacher and his conscience, something has to give. And Reacher never gives an inch.

Customer Reviews: Read 279 more reviews...

1 out of 5 stars

Rare miss for Child June 10, 2008
146 out of 163 found this review helpful

Disappointing. After reeling off 11 good to (often) great Reacher novels, Lee Child struck out with this one. It starts promising enough. Despair had all the makings of a great stage for Reacher to be Reacher, reminiscent of the Killing Floor. But the promise is never fulfilled. The meandering plot doesn't pull you in. Unlike previous stories, the villain is flat, two dimensional and far from frightening - a death sentence for any story of good vs. evil. The action is sparse.

Previous Reacher novels were impossible to put down. You were torn between your desire to get to the end and your hope that the story would keep going. After all, it would be another year before you got the next one. Sadly, that was not true here. The ending seemed slapped on, left lots of loose ends untied and seemed very uncharacteristic for Reacher. But worst of all, it didn't come too soon. It could have come 100 pages sooner.

These were the big problems with the book. Reacher's detour into politics and criticism of the war did seem out of character but not because I had any assumptions about his politics. He always struck me as outside of politics - outside of almost everything for that matter.

Lee, everyone is entitled to a miss, especially after the roll you have been on. Here is hoping the next one is back to your old form

2 out of 5 stars

Everything to Lose, Lee June 7, 2008
96 out of 119 found this review helpful

Holy conspiracy theories, Batman! Did somebody take James Lee Burke and tuck his liberal rants between the covers of a Lee Child novel?

Don't get me wrong - Burke and Child are two of my favorite authors - but the venerable Burke started a fast descent when his politics began to irrationally overpower the gripping atmospheric prose of the Mississippi delta and Dave Robicheaux's hard-hitting tales of southern noir. But if one were to judge Child solely on the basis of "Nothing to Lose", they might conclude that that he is already well down that slippery slope. Which would be a true disservice to the author and his readers.

So this starts out as the vintage Lee Child/Jack Reacher thrill fest, with the stoic loaner Reacher alone on a desolate highway separating the fictitious and allegorically named Colorado towns of Hope and Despair. Borrowing heavily from Stallone's "First Blood" - and even a bit from Stephen King's eerie "Desperation" - Reacher wants nothing more than a cup of coffee while passing through Despair. Instead, he finds himself first ignored and then in jail for vagrancy. With a provocative and mysterious prologue, and Reacher's first fist fight by page fifteen, all the pieces were quickly falling into place for a classic Child/Reacher escape to fast action and delicious revenge. The mystery of the Despair deepened, a company town supported by a massive metal recycling plant and controlled Waco-like by the omnipresent "Mr. Thurman". And keeping with his trusted and successful formula, Child provides Reacher's love interest in the form of "Vaughan", a patrolman of neighboring Hope.

But a promising start begins to fray around the edges a hundred-or-so pages in, and, by halfway through, has literally lost all "Hope". Repeated encounters between Reacher and Thurman and his thugs become tedious - even boring, unheard of in Child's pages - as the plot meanders and stumbles through incongruities and inconsistencies alien to Child's usually credible plot lines and meticulous research. But in this installment, while Child can still add depth and interest to a story with minutia ranging from the perfect cup of coffee to the physics of a cell phone call, he is inexcusably sloppy in tying together his central theme. Unlike the smart, lean, and unencumbered prose we've been conditioned to expect, "Nothing to Lose" reads with all the clarity and efficiency you'd expect in a "Code Pink" manifesto.

It's a shame, really. Lee Child is arguably the standard in contemporary thriller/action fiction, and Jack Reacher is, as so well said by the Chicago Sun-Times, "...the perfect hero, loved by women, feared by men, respected by all." But not this time. Let's just hope that this episode's muddled and confused Reacher is an aberration, and that next year's entry will return to the straightforward thrills of "Persuader", "Tripwire", or "Killing Floor", rather than following James Lee Burke down a path that will not only cost him a loyal fan base, but also tarnish the great writing that justifiably has earned their fealty.

4 out of 5 stars

Reacher said: "I'm not looking for a search warrant. I'm waiting for dark." June 3, 2008
80 out of 106 found this review helpful

After having Reacher team up with his former army colleagues in "Bad Luck and Trouble", Lee Child has gone back to Reacher's loner roots. "Nothing to Lose" opens with Reacher literally walking into the small town of Despair, Colorado, where he's promptly arrested and run out of town. What are the secrets that the residents of Despair are so desperate to keep hidden? Reacher is equally determined to find out and no one is going to stop him.

The pace of this book is slower than most of the others that Lee Child has written and my feeling is that perhaps it relates to a departure from formula. Usually Reacher encounters someone - a former colleague, an attractive woman, a man with a missing wife - with a problem and that creates the momentum. In this book, he simply stumbles on behavior that he finds odd, and therefore starts investigating, with several clandestine visits to Despair that do start to feel somewhat repetitive. Along the way he teams up with a local policewoman who also provides the obligatory romantic sub-plot. The book keeps you guessing with lots of sub-plots and little mysteries along the way (some of which turn out to be red herrings, but I suppose that adds to the intrigue).

"Nothing to Lose" delivered my much-anticipated "Reacher fix", but it's not Lee Child's best. Although it's a stand-alone novel, I wouldn't recommend starting here if you haven't read any other Lee Child books: you won't get what the fuss is about. I wasn't as absorbed by this one as I have been by the others in the series. The middle section dragged a little, but having said that it's still an easy read that goes down fast and keeps you up turning pages into the night. Probably if it had been another author this would have rated 3 stars for me, but I'm a shameless Reacher fan, so I'm rating it 4 stars.

1 out of 5 stars

A very disappointing failure; muddled, confused, and unengaging June 7, 2008
38 out of 50 found this review helpful

I've been a Child/Reacher fan throughout the series, but in this unfortunate effort Child stumbles badly.

Briefly, while hitchhiking through Colorado, Reacher finds himself thrown out of the town of Despair for reasons he can't fathom. Naturally this gets his back up, and he decides to make the point that he can't be thrown out of ANY town.

Just like in David Morrell's seminal Rambo novel "First Blood".

Along the way he has an affair with a cop from the neighboring town of Hope; uncovers a couple of conspiracies revolving around the Iraq war, Christian fundamentalists, and Army deserters; and basically tears up the scenery.

Reacher has always been an existential, somewhat nihilistic, central character. But there were certain cornerstones of his character that were fundamental and appealing. An inviolate sense of justice, and a willingness to go to any lengths to help an oppressed underdog.

None of that pertains in this novel, which serves more as a soapbox from which Child preaches his own political views, views which seem to conflict with those we've come to associate with Reacher himself. In this book, Reacher -- himself a former career Army MP officer -- has suddenly become anti-military and anti-war. Jangling and disconcerting, to say the least.

Further, there's no clarity to the story itself. The people of the town of Despair act in unbelievable concert, and their motivation for doing so is never explained in the book. They're almost like the zombies in "Night of the Living Dead".

The twin towns of Hope and Despair seem to exist in a void in the landscape, isolated physically and -- apparently -- functionally from the rest of the state. The few residents of Hope whom we meet in the book all seem to know something bad is going on in Despair, but no one -- including the cops -- does anything about it. Not the cops, not the people; no one even bothers to notify the state authorities, evidently. It's as if this little part of Colorado exists in a vacuum. Very Twilight Zone.

As far as execution, there's a lot of Reacher going back and forth between Hope and Despair -- how metaphorical, I'm sure -- and it's boring, frankly. Further, the "science" of some of the aspects of the book is just plain wrong, as is Child's description of some aspects of US Army organization -- a flaw you'd think Child would be able to avoid with a little basic research, which you'd think he'd have done if his central character's an ex-Army officer.

The success of the Reacher novels in the past has been somewhat formulaic, but it's an appealing formula: Reacher stumbles onto a situation in which an innocent is being victimized by an evil person. They're stories about justice ultimately prevailing, but they're also, at their core, small stories. This is appropriate and believable for a Lone Ranger-type figure like Jack Reacher.

In this book Child is trying to have Reacher take on an entire system, and it doesn't wash at all. A bad case of over-Reaching (sorry; I couldn't help myself).

1 out of 5 stars

Despair.... June 9, 2008
33 out of 46 found this review helpful

Unfortunately Mr. Child has decided to inject his politics into what used to be my favorite book series and my favorite character. After 300 pages of atypical meandering, boring, storyline from Mr. Child we are then subjected to 100 pages of anti-american, anti-Bush, anti-military, anti-christian bias from the author. Reacher used to be my most awaited book, I doubt that I will ever buy another of Mr. Child's books. What a shame and shame on the author.
Of Course now that Child/Reacher is out of the leftwing closet think of all the new plotlines that can be used: Reacher the Eco-Warrior kicking butt on all americans that don't worship at the altar of "An Inconvenient Truth", or Reacher defender of oppressed "undocumented americans" the possibilities are endless!!!

Honestly this series used to be one of the few places that I could escape the intrusion of political correctness and indoctrination and just be entertained by a main character that epitomized good vs evil and believed in doing the right thing.... oh well so much for that....

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