Jack's a loner, and it is fitting that he's back on the road again after trying unsuccessfully to settle down. He's in hot, dry, west Texas (and Child really makes you feel as though you are there - you're thirsty throughout the story!) where he's enlisted himself to help an abused (?) wife, Carmen Greer, and her daughter, Ellie. Greer's tale is fraught with lies, and, if I were Jack, I would have given up on her. She's not able to escape her husband, Sloop, and his secretive pack of friends thathave a past that leads to bloodshed.
The pace bogs down from time to time, and it is difficult to root for Carmen. The ending is a lot more transparent than anything Child has given us previously. Worst of all, Child gets bogged down in his own descriptiveness, a problem encountered in his earlier works, where it was more forgiveable and did less to hurt his characterization and his pace.
Not giving up on Jack, because he is the most refreshing hero of the past few years, but one more average work by Lee Child will send me scurrying for some new authors!
A former Army major assigned to the Military Police, Jack has been aimlessly roaming the United States through several novels, and attracting big trouble in each one. In ECHO BURNING, he's hitchhiked into sunburnt West Texas where he's given a ride by Carmen Greer, who's cruising the highways on the lookout for a Tough Guy. Carmen lives with her young daughter, Ellie, on an arid ranch with her hateful brother-in-law and mother-in-law while her husband, Sloop, serves time in a federal pen for tax evasion. According to the story Carmen spins, her spouse had been viciously beating her for years. Since Sloop is due to be released in forty-eight hours, Carmen expects the beatings to begin anew, especially since she was the one that ratted on Sloop to the IRS. Will Reacher kill him for her? No? Well, will he at least teach her how to shoot the dainty pistol she's purchased? (In the meantime, what's with that team of three professional assassins circling the ranch unbeknownst to all? Jack may discover his hands full.)
All those other Tough Guys I mentioned are smart, but not so much that they don't sporadically get beaten up and kicked silly by the Bad Guys. But not Reacher - nobody gets the drop on him. When the reader sees a violent confrontation looming, he almost feels sorry for the villains for the World of Hurt in which they'll soon find themselves. By his own admission, Jack's a hard man who likes cockroaches better than the men (and women) he's sometimes forced to exterminate.
Reacher is endlessly fascinating. Having gone from one Army post to another, first as an Army brat and then on his own as an MP officer, he's never known a permanent home. So, now he chooses to live as a near-vagrant, shunning commitment to material things and the occasional interesting woman. He travels only with testosterone and a toothbrush, buying cheap clothes to wear and discard as he goes. He's educated, intelligent and gentlemanly, but excruciatingly asocial (as opposed to antisocial, which he's not) and heroically ignorant about how a "normal" life - wife, house, mortgage, kids, dog, 9 to 5, and Lexus - is lived. This is a man whom all you single ladies out there would love the chance to improve. (Don't cave, Jack! Be a role model for the rest of us New Age men pining to be free!)
Hey, all you other Tough Guys of lore and legend, move aside and make room for a Real Man.