The Affair

I just finished reading The Affair.  It is Lee Child’s sixteenth book casting Jack Reacher.  Jack is the man that most teenage boys wish they could be—big, strong, smart, confident, and fearless with war scars and more success in bed than Stuart Wood’s Stone Barrington.  In the first fifteen novels, he has washed out of the army and is hitch hiking across America, righting wrongs that only a vigilante can right.  He is one of my favorite characters, perhaps because some vestigial teenager lies entrapped within my seasoned skin.  The Affair takes us back to the beginning and shows us how Reacher squashed his career as an MP in the Army.  The plot involves a series of murders of women, a beautiful female police chief with a suspicious past, a politician with a lot to lose, and Jack’s superiors who order him to cover up any evidence that might taint the Army.  Needless to say, Jack has a problem with authority.  Ronald Regan once said, “Trust, but verify.”  This book reinforces that basic principle.  Much of what Jack is told comes from solid sources, but lives depend upon his ability to decipher the truth.