Jack Reacher manages to bring down a militia organization that wants to go to war with the united states and kill women and children to prove a point. He manages to stop the bombing and save the girl.
It's an excellent book in the traditional Lee Child way. The tension is tight and the fast. Jack Reacher is a person who is realistic and so are the other characters in the book.
Enjoy.
In short order Reacher learns that his kidnap companion is FBI agent Holly Johnson who is recuperating from torn knee ligaments and on light duty for the moment. She happens to be the daughter of Joint Chiefs of Staff leader General Johnson and also the god daughter of the president.
After a long arduous journey, in which Reacher declines several escape attempts to protect the injured Johnson, they finally arrive at an enclosure deep in the forests of northwestern Montana. This geographically secure enclosure is the home of the Montana Militia, a para-military neo-Nazi group headed by a 400 pound behemoth Beau Borken. Borken, a paranoid and maniacal son of a California farmer who blew his head off when the government repossessed his farm, is a ruthless murderer who has no use for the U.S. government. He plans to use Holly Johnson's kidnapping to convert his militia into a separate nation!
The FBI gets wind of the plot through a covert operative within Borken's group. Without presidential support they commence an operation to free Johnson. Reacher, of course, while being held prisoner also plots to accomplish the same thing.
Childs' follow up to The Killing Floor, while falling a little short of the intrigue is still suspenseful and a worthwhile chapter in a continuing series.
In this book Jack Reacher is a by-stander grabbed by the kidnappers of a young FBI agent. As the author tells all the critics of coincidenses being at the heart of the novel: @It was a freak chance." Truthuly, I don't like coincidences in books, too, but I can forgive them in a good one. This is one of those. Why did the bad guys kidnap a FBI agent? What is being built in a room in a remote Oklahoma location? And who is the man, who cruelly kills the workers, after they completed building?
Mr. Child wrights with sureness of a seasoned author, and when he takes a rest from plot turns he gives you the action scenes most authors would die trying to reproduce. It is a rare author indeed, who can talk about velocities, weapon parts and all the technical data, and still keeping it exciting.
There are minor points which cost the book one star in my opinion - the main being some things coming out of the blue in the last pages of the novel (these things concern Holly, and I won't say any more of them), but this is really a strong thriller, with a solid plot, hard-as-nails protagonist and the book equivalent of bullet-time scenes of Matrix.