Rahul Akash

Having read five books (Killing Floor, 61 Hours, Worth Dying For, The Wanted Man, Never Go Back) of the Jack Reacher series, I had never felt bored or had wanted the story to end all at once until I read this book. This book is a big downgrade compared to the previous book in the series. The plot revolves around Jack Reacher who,as usual, is at the wrong place at the wrong time and finds himself in the middle of chaos. This time, he gets kidnapped along with a young FBI agent by three men in broad daylight. They lock them up in a van and drive around for 2 days till they reach their destination on the third day. Reacher finds on arrival that the FBI agent is a high value hostage for a militia due to her family background which they aim to take advantage of to fulfill their demands. The rest of the plot is all about how Reacher saves the everyone and gets out of there safely. Compared to the previous book in the series 'Killing Floor's, this book is a serious downgrade. I would say there are two main reasons for this. First, the story lacks a strong antagonist. Jack Reacher is portrayed as a well built intelligent man in this book as well. In the other books, the antagonist is also someone who is either as intelligent as Reacher or has more muscle power than him. But in this case, the antagonists are really dumb and even though they are armed to the teeth with the terrain being in their favour, they are no match for Reacher who just seems to eliminate them at will. The next reason is the plot is too predictable.Contrary to the Killing Floor, where the reader keeps on pondering over how the counterfeit notes are printed, this plot hardly had any such thing to keep the reader thrilled. It was just too easy to figure the course of the plot. It doesn't help in keeping the reader thrilled about what he is about to read. I had a really good opinion about this series but this book has made me feel sceptical of further reading the remaining ones in the series.