Capri's Homage to Reacher is a Bit of a Reach

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Diane Capri - Don't Know Jack

For Special Agent Kim Otto, the hunt begins with a phone call in the wee small hours of the morning. Actually, it began earlier with the delivery of a “burner” cell phone and a slim file on her target… but the real action starts with that phone call. She’s ordered onto a flight from Detroit to Atlanta, where she will meet her “second,” Special Agent Carlos Gaspar out of Miami. Their orders are to head to the town of Margrave, Georgia, to pick up the long-cold trail of their target… Jack (no middle) Reacher.

Just why the two are looking for Reacher isn’t readily apparent. As far as Otto can tell, he’s a paranoid killer who’s been off the grid for fifteen years now, and her unnamed “boss” has decided it’s time to bring him to justice. The notion that he’s a bad guy just goes to show you that these two feebs Don’t Know Jack.

Otto and Gaspar stumble into a bizarre murder scene and cryptic clues about counterfeiting and a high-level DC coverup involving hookers, mistresses, or both. They’re helped, albeit reluctantly, by superfox MILF Chief of Police Beverly Roscoe Trent, who just happens to have a gorgeous – and tall – 15-year-old daughter named Jacqueline, or Jack for short. The “boss” continues to send them willy-nilly around the mid-Atlantic region to talk to people, and – for some unknown reason – they end up in Washington’s most renowned brothel where Otto – for some unknown reason – has an unstated relationship with the madam. They solve the murder, of course, but their target stays just out of reach…

Diane Capri’s first fan-fiction novel in homage to Jack Reacher, Don’t Know Jack is filled with references to Killing Floor (the first novel in Lee Child’s 22-episode Reacher series), including references to “Kliner” counterfeit C-notes and an interview with the detective who originally arrested Reacher, Lamont Finlay. Child himself wrote the afterword for the novel (at least the ePub version I read). Capri’s style is similar, although – unlike Reacher – Otto doesn't ever get around to doin' the nasty with the male lead.

Capri’s novel progresses nicely, especially if you’re a fan of the Reacher series, for about thirty-six chapters. At that point, Otto has tracked a missing woman into Marion Wallace’s DC “party house,” where suddenly it’s as if you’ve shifted into a different book. Sure, the two are still looking for Reacher, but all of a sudden they’re referring to the mysterious voice on the telephone by his surname, instead of as “the boss.” Otto seems surprised that Wallace doesn’t seem to recognize her, even though they have some unstated history that appears to involve Otto’s ex-husband (who’d only been mentioned once or twice before). The shifts are, quite frankly, puzzling.

As a mystery, the novel is pretty pedestrian, and seems mainly interesting for its tie-in to the Reacher series; not to mention the Tom Cruise movie that was released later in the year. The shift from an omniscient, omnipotent boss to “Cooper on the top floor of the FBI building” is unsettling, in particular because in subsequent “Hunt for Reacher” short stories the boss becomes once again anonymous. Were it not for that flaw, I’d have rated this slightly above average, but that’s too glaring for my tastes.

copyright © 2017-2023 scmrak

Reacher as a Teen Looks a Lot Like Reacher at Forty

"High Heat: A Reacher Novella" - Lee Child

A former coworker’s wife is a well-known author of true crime fiction. A few years back, she discovered that she could repurpose old articles and other content by publishing them only in e-content form and selling them at $2.99 per download as her fans gobbled them up. Apparently she isn't the only one – now you can now find short stories, short story collections and novellas all over Amazon at “bargain” prices. It’s apparently great way for well-known authors to bank some bucks for work they’d never published. A case in point is “High Heat,” a Jack Reacher novella from prolific author Lee Child.

Reacher Reaches Nineteen, a Personal Milestone but Still Mediocre

Personal: A Jack Reacher Novel - Lee Childs

Considering the fact that I read dozens of novels every year, lots of them of the “no socially-redeeming qualities” variety, you might think that I had already devoured all eighteen of the Jack Reacher novels penned by Lee Childs. You’d be wrong: before Personal, the nineteenth in the series, my only exposure to Childs’ protagonist had been the Tom Cruise movie from 2012 which I’ve (accidentally) seen twice. Be that as it may, people have always sad that the novels in the series aren’t so interrelated that you have to read them in order, so I bit on Personal. I gotta say, the immense popularity of the series is a little puzzling to me…

Jack Reacher is, as usual, riding a bus somewhere when he spots the advertisement asking him to phone an old buddy. He makes the call, and within hours is whisked to a supersecret CIA billet on the opposite coast headed by an old acquaintance. There he learns that someone has hired a freelance sniper to put a bullet in the brain of one (or more) of the G-8 attendees, and the meeting in London is mere days away. Reacher’s needed because, at least in theory, he knows the mind of one of the four probably sniper candidates, having put him in jail fifteen years ago. John Kott is now free, and in the wind.

Reacher and his CIA minder, a tasty morsel named Casey Nice, head to Paris and then London in search of Kott. People die, Reacher does whatever it is that Reacher always does, and the evil plot underneath it all is exposed.

Par for the course for Reacher, I’m told.