Jack Reacher Faces Tough Choices in The Midnight Line

The Anti-Procedural
Reacher’s adventures are generally much less structured than those of most recurring characters in thriller novels. But his books do have a repeated structure: Reacher—retired former Army Major in the military police turned cross-country drifter—lands in a new town, runs into a few hard cases, and takes up a cause for someone. There are fistfights, gunplay, and a mystery to be solved. But the genius of Lee Child is that despite these similarities, every Reacher novel is different, because each book opens as a blank canvas. At the center of The Midnight Line is a hero questioning his role in the universe—a question that makes it the best Reacher novel in a while (and that’s saying something).

Took the Midnight Train Going Anywhere
The Midnight Line picks up in the wake of Make Me, the twentieth Reacher novel (last year’s Night School was a prequel). The opening sequence sees Reacher awaken to find that Michelle Chang, his partner and companion from the earlier adventure, has gone home to Seattle, leaving behind nothing but a note. Reacher climbs on the first bus going anywhere, and during a comfort stop, he wanders the street and spots a West Point class ring in a pawn shop window. It’s a small woman’s ring, and he wonders what would prompt a West Point graduate to pawn it off. The ring is dated 2005, which Reacher calculates put the graduate right in line for service in Iraq and Afghanistan—Reacher can guess at several sad stories that might lead to a desperate pawn shop visit.
In these early pages, Reacher thinks about Chang often, and contemplates his procedure with a weary, mechanical objectivity. He isn’t a man eagerly searching for his next adventure; he’s a man who’s been living his life a certain way for a very long time, and wondering if he’s doing things right. As the story goes on, Chang fades from Reacher’s thoughts, but a vein of melancholy and exhaustion is threaded through the book. Reacher isn’t a superhuman; he’s big, well-trained in violence, and very smart, but he’s just a guy. Making him doubt himself is a tonic for the character—and the series.

The Mystery
This melancholy suits the story, too. Reacher’s detective chops are sometimes overlooked in favor of his fighting skills, but he’s always been a brilliant observational gumshoe, spotting details most people miss, and making the deductions few are capable of. The West Point ring is a clue, and Reacher brings all of his considerable smarts to bear on it, tracing its appearance backward through time and space, solely because he feels a kinship to the woman who sold it. He wants to return it, in the hopes that whatever trouble prompted her to sell it is over—or, at least, to satisfy his curiosity.
His investigation leads him into the world of opiate addiction, which is just about as timely as you can get. At first it seems like Child is heading for a standard sort of story, but then Reacher meets a small-town bigshot named Scorpio. You expect Scorpio to try to run him off, and fail spectacularly. Then the story takes a surprising dive into the miserable life of the ring’s former owner, giving Child has a chance to explore the tragedies behind real stories of Purple Heart recipients, how people become—and stay—addicted to legal, made-in-America opioids, and the hidden economy of rural poverty, in which people sell off everything they have for a chance to feel good for a few hours, just one more time.
Worth It
In the end, Reacher gets the answers he wants, and, as usual, he stands up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. The mystery has threads that begin overseas and end in a small town in the Midwest, where Reacher shares a moment of grace with a woman who’s been broken and put back together again, badly . Along the way there are several attempts to assassinate Reacher and a bravura sequence in which the action hero and his allies rob a drug smuggling operation, all communicated via spare, unadorned prose Lee Child is famous for. On the last page, Reacher faces a choice, again: to take the next ride going anywhere, or to choose a destination, for once. Long time fans won’t be surprised at his decision—or at how great The Midnight Line is.