Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Personal

The latest of the "Jack Reacher" novels by Lee Child finds Reacher responding to an ad in The Army Times because he owes someone a favor. When he follows up, he is pulled into an all-hands-on-deck effort to locate the would-be assassin of the French president who took a shot from an extraordinary distance--almost 3/4 mile. The CIA and State Department, think this was only the audition for an attack on the leaders who will be attending the upcoming G8 meeting outside London. The bullet was American, and the only American sniper capable of such a shot is someone Reacher put in jail 15 years ago who is now out of prison and out of sight. Reacher is told he has the best chance of finding this sniper, Kott. Other nations are putting forth similar efforts to track down other snipers from their own military elites, but Kott is all Reacher's, and as Reacher investigates, it appears that Kott is also looking for him.
Reacher gets paired up with a fairly young CIA agent who is the official liaison to the State Department. He doesn't want her there for a number of reasons. She is inexperienced in the field, she is taking tranquilizers to maintain, and she reminds him too much of another young woman who was killed in a joint operation with Reacher. As they travel first to Paris and then to London, Reacher uses brains as well as brawn to figure out where Kott is hiding. But something else is not adding up and Reacher insists at the last minute that his handlers back in the states are kept out of the loop as he closes in on Kott, takes him down, and returns to the states. It turns out that the real enemy was right back at home, where this whole manufactured threat started. A twisty surprise at the end.
Other blog posts on Lee Child books are Never Go Back, Killing Floor, Gone Tomorrow, and 61 Hours

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