Gone Tomorrow
Lee Child
Dell, 2009
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-0440243687
576 pages; $9.99

61 Hours
Lee Child
Delacorte Press, 2010
ISBN 978-0-385-34058-8
400 pages; $28.00

Jack Reacher has been one of my heroes for about the last decade, ever since I first discovered Lee Child’s protagonist in his long-running series of thrillers. In much the same way that Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone became so real to me that they were practically friends of the family. This loner, who owns nothing but the clothes on his back, a portable toothbrush and an ATM card to a bank account that keeps him in funds, always seems to find trouble – and to fix it.

In recent years, Reacher’s adventures have gotten a bit less compelling, seemed a bit too similar to one another, and sometimes fell over the edge into nihilistic violence that were just a bit too much for my taste. This devolution seemed complete in Gone Tomorrow, in which Child seemed to have been bitten by the “bestseller bug” that afflicts so many ultra-successful thriller writers: short chapters (usually three to five pages long) with short paragraphs, plenty of sentence fragments as stand-alone paragraphs to build tension, and a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter. It makes for a quick read, true, and Gone Tomorrow was definitely decorating the bestseller lists when it came out a little more than a year ago, but it’s the junk food of the literature banquet. If Child started out giving us the gourmet version of a thriller, now he was writing the equivalent of a fast-food burger.

Gone Tomorrow starts when Reacher is riding a subway car in Manhattan and sees a woman who shows all the signs of being a suicide bomber. From there, it lurches into an investigation of terrorism in which Child is taken into the confidence of several different law enforcement agencies and tasked with averting an enormous threat to the United States almost single-handedly. Reacher promises to get the job done, no matter what it takes.

Gone Tomorrow improves as it goes along, but the whole novel feels like Child has reached the limits of what he can do with Reacher. He’s an excellent character with an interesting background, and his military knowledge never fails to add great color to strongly plotted books, but based on the evidence of Gone Tomorrow, I would say that it’s time for him to go into retirement.

Perhaps that’s why I broke my habit of years and did not purchase a signed copy of the 2010 Reacher novel, but instead got on the waiting list at the library for my shot at it. I may reverse that decision, because 61 Hours is a fine book, a return to form for Child – maybe even as good as some of the earliest in the series. It is so good for many reasons, including its unexpected and unresolved ending; Reacher’s failure to have no-strings-attached sex with the nearest available female; and Reacher’s seeming cluelessness this time around, as opposed to his usual secret inside knowledge that allows him and him alone to solve the mystery. Certainly it’s not the fairly lame device of counting down from 61 hours until the climax.

The story is set in South Dakota in the middle of the winter. I’ve been in South Dakota at that time of year, and I assure you that the cold there is nothing to mess with. Reacher, who usually manages to get himself to southern climes during the winter months, is completely unprepared for the arctic air and the far below zero windchills. The weather plays an important role in this book, and it’s actually nice to see that Reacher struggles with it, a lot. He’s also in a place where his lack of wheels is a serious problem; he can’t always get to where he’s needed in the blink of an eye, and he can’t take care of everything with a single well-placed punch. It’s refreshing to see that Reacher is human after all.

Reacher winds up in South Dakota because a bus he’s on crashes in the middle of a blizzard, and he has no way to move on until a replacement bus gets there – which won’t be for several days. All of the motels and hotels in town are at capacity because it’s visiting day at the new federal prison, so the passengers have to be fobbed off on town residents. All of the passengers are clearly harmless, elderly people on a group trip to see Mount Rushmore at a time of year when no one else wants to go, which is why they can afford it. Reacher is the anomaly, someone who saw a half-empty bus and made a private deal with the driver for a trip west. No one really wants to put up this rather suspicious character except for the Assistant Chief of Police, Andrew Peterson.

Not surprisingly for a Child thriller, Reacher gets involved in the murder case Peterson is investigating. As the bigger plot is revealed, Reacher uses his remaining military connections to figure out exactly what’s going on at that abandoned Air Force site just outside town where a bunch of bikers are dealing methamphetamine. Even more, Reacher becomes integral to the protection of a federal witness to a meth sales transaction.

What I found most notable about this book, though, is that Child has returned to a strong style and method of storytelling. Perhaps he has been reading Robert B. Parker’s Spenser mysteries, because he tells a good portion of his story through dialogue, a technique Parker honed to perfection. Advancing a plot substantially through dialogue is much harder than you might imagine, but Child does it well, in much crisper fashion than his previous books. Chapters and paragraphs have heft here, and the “instant bestseller” format of Gone Tomorrow is – well, gone today. 61 Hours is a much better book.

61 Hours ends in a cliffhanger, with the promise of a new novel coming out October 19, 2010. That’s a much shorter gap between thrillers for Child than usual, which makes me all the more curious about what October will bring. I’m glad I didn’t give up on Child after Gone Tomorrow, and I’m glad there will be a new thriller from Child’s pen in a mere three months.

Shoot to Thrill
P.J. Tracy
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-0-399-15520-8
320 pages; $25.95

The Monkeewrench gang is still at it, thank goodness. Shoot to Thrill is another fine entry in this series written by a mother and daughter under the joint penname of P.J. Tracy.

Those familiar with the series, which began with Monkeewrench and proceeded through Live Bait, Dead Run and Snow Blind, will be happy to learn that there’s a new one, the first since 2006. Because the first three thrillers about this group of computer hackers came out at roughly yearly intervals, I was afraid that Tracy had taken the series as far as she intended. Fortunately, though, Grace McBride, Harley Davidson, Roadrunner and Annie Belinsky are still at it, with all the usual hangers-on and sidekicks who are becoming more three-dimensional with each new book. A new and interesting character, FBI agent John Smith, joins the team this time around, as the man who has brought them a problem that only their computer skills are likely to solve.

Fans of television crime shows will not be shocked at the premise of this thriller (which, by the way, has absolutely nothing to do with the title so far as I can tell – one of my pet peeves about this genre). Murderers are posting films of their crimes on YouTube. Worse, they are sending out posts in advance of their crimes that basically state where they will take place in a sort of code intended to clue in other afficianados of snuff films. Monkeewrench’s first task is to give the FBI a way to differentiate films of actual murders from those of staged playacting, but its role soon grows to decoding messages and otherwise playing an integral role in solving the crime.

The biggest difference between this novel and the three other Monkeewrench thrillers I’ve read (I’ve yet to get to Snow Blind) is that this time none of the Monkeewrench gang is in any direct peril. That is a sensible move on Tracy’s part – it wouldn’t be realistic to have this group of relatively nice folks under constant attack – but it does tend to ratchet down the suspense, even as the reader is waiting to see whether a particular murder has been forestalled.

As is my practice when reviewing thrillers, I’m not going to tell you anything else about the book, because that would ruin it for you. I advise you to not even read the jacket copy. Just know that Tracy still rises above the mass of thriller writers to give her readers something unique and fun to read. Throw this in your suitcase for your summer beach vacation.

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
Anthony Bourdain
Ecco, 2010
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-0-06-171894-6
304 pages; $26.99

Anthony Bourdain is a lucky man, and he knows it. His first book about the world of restaurants, chefs and line cooks, Kitchen Confidential, became a wild bestseller when his biggest hope was that it would be a cult classic in New York and its surrounding states. Based on the success of that book, Bourdain landed a gig with the Food Network traveling around the world and eating – nice work if you can get it! Other doors opened from there, and now Bourdain, rich, married and a new father, has it made. To get to where he is from having been a drug addict working up to 20 hours a day in whatever kitchen would take him is quite a journey.

Medium Raw doesn’t have the power of Kitchen Confidential. Kitchen Confidential was hot, angry, frustrated and still, in sections, lyrical about food and the people who create magnificent dishes for the delectation of others. Medium Raw is mellow, gossipy – still fun to read, but mostly toothless. For example, in Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain warned diners against ever ordering fish in any restaurant on a Monday. It’s left over from the weekend, he said, not fresh, not good, maybe even dangerous. In Medium Raw, on the contrary, he says, “But eat the fucking fish on Monday already. Okay?” Bourdain writes that times have changed and that “The odds are better than ever that the guy slinging fish and chips back there in the kitchen actually gives a shit about what he’s doing.” He claims he’s still angry, but it’s hard to tell from most of Medium Raw.

There are a couple of chapters that stand out as great memories and even great writing. The one that sticks with me the most is Chapter 8, “My Aim Is True,” about Justo Thomas, who skins, bones and cuts fish for Le Bernardin in Manhattan. Seven hundred pounds a day, one fish at a time, coming to him almost straight out of the water, “the way they catch” – on the bone, the way God made them. Justo has everything just so in his work area, and is meticulous about his knives (not as sharp as you’d expect, because if they’re too sharp, they’ll slice right through a fish bone instead of catching on it, thereby allowing him to remove it), his gloves, his plastic wrap – every single detail. He’s something of a miracle; when he goes on vacation, it takes three people to cut the same amount of fish that Justo scales, guts, cleans and portions in four or five hours.

Bourdain discusses how Justo cuts fish in about 15 pages, and there isn’t a wasted word. You can learn more about how the best restaurants operate in these 15 pages than you can by reading whole books by other authors, and you gain a respect for the simple act of cutting fish that you probably never had before. It’s fascinating. And the denouement – Justo eats a meal at the restaurant where he’s worked for years for the first time ever – is utterly satisfying.

Bourdain writes about why we should care about a Wagyu steak and never, ever, eat it in the form of a burger. He talks about how to persuade a child that McDonald’s isn’t something she ever wants to eat – how to make Ronald McDonald into an enemy. In a return to (hilarious) form, he rails against Alice Waters and her many contradictions (firing up a wood stove just to cook a single egg? How is that sustainable? And isn’t Waters supposed to be the queen of sustainability?). He has a whole chapter on heroes and villains among chefs; if you’re a foodie, you’ll have heard of some of these folks (Alain Ducasse, for instance, who famously opened a restaurant in New York that went so far as to offer you a choice of pens with which to sign your check at the end of a meal) and some will be new to you unless you’re really tied into the restaurant scene in New York (such as Terrance Brennan, who is single-handedly spearheading the attempt to bring the notion of a cheese course to American diners). He questions the notion of the tasting menu at even the very best restaurants; does anyone really need to eat that much? Is it really even pleasant, ultimately, to eat such a large meal?

There’s much more, all of it written in Bourdain’s breezy, exceptionally readable style. You can devour this entire book in a single afternoon in a hammock, after which you’ll feel obliged to get to the best restaurant in your city for an elegant meal, followed by a viewing of “Julie and Julia” as you digest after returning home. Bon appetit!