Countdown in South Dakota

Lennoxville Library

James Dover Grant has published 35 Jack Reacher books under the pen name of Lee Child, most of which are novels. Grant started his writing career working for Granada Television and was involved in shows like Prime Suspect and Cracker. When Granada let him go, he moved to New York and started the Reacher books. He is turning the franchise over to his brother Andrew so he can concentrate on writing other things.

Unlike most novelists who write detective series, Child does not place his protagonist in a large city as a means of providing diversity of characters and plot. Reacher is a homeless person who moves from place to place, largely at random. He does not even carry a suitcase; he just buys new clothes every few days and donates the old ones to a local charity. Finding clothes to fit is more of a chore; at six foot five and 250 pounds, buying off the rack can’t be easy.

61 Hours (2010) begins at 2:55 on a snowy afternoon in a prison outside Bolton, South Dakota. A lawyer is visiting an inmate who provides him with instructions for 14 crimes that the lawyer will pass on to someone else who will set these crimes into action. Thus begins the countdown of 61 hours: everything that is going to happen will happen by 3:55 in the morning three days later.

At this time, Reacher is asleep on a bus heading west on I-90. He is with a group of seniors from Seattle who are heading for Mount Rushmore on their way back home. An eastbound car skids on a frozen overpass, causing the bus driver to flinch and lose control, ending up with the nose of the bus in a culvert and the rear end jutting out into the highway. As the only nonsenior, apart from the driver, Reacher disembarks and plants flares in the highway behind the bus in an effort to prevent it from being rear ended. The driver is able to contact local police who inform him that the highway has been closed at Rapid City. The police will send help, but not for a couple of hours. In the meantime, the challenge will be to keep the elderly passengers warm.

Eventually a prison bus shows up to take the passengers into town, where billets have been arranged for all of them except Reacher. The deputy chief of police will take him in. He thinks Reacher can help with a problem. In addition to the prison to the north of Bolton, there is also an abandoned cold war military installation to the west of town. Recently it has been occupied by a bike gang and its entourage. The bikers are suspected of running a meth lab, although the police have not been able to find anybody who is delivering ingredients. Furthermore, the DEA’S satellites which search for fumes that are characteristic of meth labs, have not detected any in the Bolton area.

There is, however, a witness who has both seen a biker selling a package of drugs and can identify him. She is also willing to testify, but she refuses to go into witness protection. Her name is Janet Slater. She grew up in Bolton and has retired to her family home after finishing her career as head librarian at Yale University. The trial is not scheduled for another month, which means the Bolton PD has to protect her for that time. A former mayor had made a Faustian deal with the company that runs the prison, which is a combined county jail, state prison and federal penitentiary: if there is a riot or an escape, all the Bolton PD must go to stations to create a perimeter around the prison and to replace guards in the sentry towers, so no one will be left to guard Janet Slater.

Andrew Peterson, the deputy chief, thinks Reacher might be helpful because he is a former army officer. He might have contacts that can tell them what the military had used the old facility for. Reacher calls his former office, the 110th Military Police HQ in Rock Creek, VA. He contacts Major Turner who has his old job, including his old metal desk with a round dent in the side. She has heard a story that the dent was caused by Reacher smashing a colonel’s head into the desk. Why he did this and why he wasn’t court martialled is an interesting story by itself. Turner starts digging out the half century old paperwork that reveals what the installation was to be used for.

Child does a really good job of building and maintaining tension. Nevertheless, I would caution against reading this book in the wintertime. Child’s descriptions of the effect of the wind and the cold are sharply reminiscent of what you have probably read in works by Jack London or Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The cold at least has the virtue of numbing the flesh; thawing out can be even more painful.

I really can’t understand how Tom Cruise was cast in the role of Reacher in the 2012 film. Reacher’s size is not just a physical attribute, it is an essential part of his mentality. “All his life, to be taller had been to be better. More dominant, more powerful, more noticed, more advantaged. You got credibility, you got treated with respect, you got promoted faster, you earned more, you got elected to things.” You can imagine Reacher’s frustration when he finds himself in a chamber with five foot six inch ceilings facing a fully upright and extremely ruthless opponent who is only four feet eleven.

61 Hours is available at the Lennoxville Library. Members are invited to join the Adult Summer Reading Club after June 21st.