Tripwire

If you are like me, you'll root harder for him to succeed than in the earlier two books where the danger and the violence seemed more contrived.

Tripwire also has a very dastardly villain of the sort that everyone loves to hate.

The book's greatest strength is that you enjoy the journey of good overcoming evil. Most action novels fail to put that point across as convincingly as this one does.

The plot itself is very predictable, but for once I didn't mind the lack of true suspense. I wanted to savor the inevitable victory.

As the story opens, Reacher has stopped drifting and has settled down to digging swimming pools by hand in Key West. A PI comes looking for him, and Reacher deflects the search out of habit. The PI soon turns up dead with some unusual crime scene details, and Reacher knows he has to get to the bottom of what's going on. That search leads him to open some new doors into the tenderest connections from his past, and Reacher finds himself thinking about a new way of life.

This book will undoubtedly annoy those who want their Vietnam-related stories to be realistic and balanced. The book will also annoy those who want a lot of suspense in their action books. Finally, the book will annoy those who don't like a tricked-up ending. This one is clearly a little too cute for its own good.

But I came away anxious to read the next entry in the series. I'm off to the library!