Friday 12 April 2019

Night School - Lee Child - Jack Reacher Book 21

Night School
Jack Reacher Book 21
Lee Child
Penguin Random House Canada
ISBN 9780804178808
eISBN 9780804178815
ASIN B019B6WTRU


I can freely admit I have become addicted to the Jack Reacher novels. As a guy who is almost 50, I should know better than to stay up too late reading, especially the night before a big presentation at work. And yet with this novel, I kept finding myself saying ‘1 more chapter’, again and again. The window for my sleep kept dwindling to less and less sleep. I could just honestly not put the book down!

I am beginning to see Reacher a bit like Captain Kirk in the original TV series of Star Trek. He sleeps with a different woman in almost every novel. He is very good at what he does, and mainly because he doesn’t quite follow all the rules. He has a great instinct. And has confidence that if he has the facts, he can figure it out. As of the writing of this review I had read 7 Reacher books in 7 weeks and believe I might be able to get caught up and read all the books in the series before the end of the year. I still struggle a bit with the change of voice between first person and third person narratives. I had thought that maybe he had something to do with if the book was set while he was still in the military or after he left. But this book dispelled that theory. I just did not have a large enough data set. So, now I have no theory around the changing voice. I have used a couple of different websites that have recommendations for which order to read the Reacher books, but I have just been jumping around. Sometimes picking the chronological one that follows the one I just finished, and sometimes the next one published. But now back to this specific novel.

This novel is set in 1996, Reacher is still in the army And just off a mission that leads to the short story, The Fourth Man. The story begins with Reacher receiving a medal in the morning for undisclosed work overseas. And in the afternoon, he is very publicly sent back to school. He is being sent to a school for interagency cooperation. When he gets there, he meets an agent from the CIA and from the FBI and immediately realises this will not be a normal school. And his hunch proves correct. They are working together and trying to find out what a Jihadi sleeper cell in Hamburg is willing to pay 100 million dollars for.  They need to figure out who the payment is for, and what it is for and the clock is ticking. Can Reacher and the others figure it out before the clock runs out?

With 23 novels, several short stories, Jack Reacher's Rules, and offerings in anthologies and mush up short stories there is a lot in the Reacher canon to read, and if we are lucky there will be many more offerings yet to come. I very much enjoyed this novel and have already picked which of the remaining books will be my next sleep killer. Another great read from the pen of Lee Child!

Books by Lee Child:
Jack Reacher Books Publishing Order:

Killing Floor
Die Trying
Tripwire
The Visitor /Running Blind
Echo Burning
Without Fail
Persuader
The Enemy
One Shot
The Hard Way
Bad Luck and Trouble
Nothing to Lose
Gone Tomorrow
61 Hours
Worth Dying For
The Affair
A Wanted Man
Never Go Back
Personal
Make Me
Night School
The Midnight Line
Past Tense
Blue Moon

The Sentinel Jack Reacher's Rules
...

Reacher Short Stories and Novella’s:
No Middle Name – Complete Collected Short Stories
Stories in No Middle Name Collection:
Too Much Time
Second Son
Deep Down
Guy Walks into A Bar
James Penney’s New Identity
High Heat
Everyone Talks
Not A Drill
Small Wars
Maybe They Have A Tradition

No Room At The Motel
The Picture of the Lonely Diner

Other Short Stories:
The Fourth Man
The Christmas Scorpion
...
Faking a Murderer with Kathy Reichs
Cleaning the Gold with Karin Slaughter
Good and Valuable Consideration with Joseph Finder
...

Other Books by Lee Child
The Hero
Jack Reacher: A Mysterious Profile
...


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