Name is pain for Reacher
IT starts off simply enough. All Jack Reacher wants to know is why a town in the middle of nowhere, on a prairie covered in wheat fields, is called Mother’s Rest.
But as Reacher fans know, the former military policeman who now wanders the back roads of the US without the usual clutter the rest of us drag around – you know, a car, bags, a change of clothes, that sort of thing – will not find an easy answer and as has been the case in all of Lee Child’s 20 Reacher novels now, will uncover things that would horrify ordinary folks.
Reacher walks around town visiting stores and asking merchants and a waitress for their theory on the source of the name, since there are no monuments or museums.
“Eight of the opinions were really no opinions at all, but merely shrugs and blank looks, along with a measure of shared defensiveness. There are weird names all over the country. Why single out Mother’s Rest, in a nation with towns called Why and Whynot, and Accident and Perculiar, and Santa Claus and No Name, and Boring and Cheesecake, and Truth and Consequences, and Monkeys Eyebrow, and Okay and Ordinary, and Pie Town and Toad Suck and Sweet Lips…’’
Americans have a thing about odd names for towns. As for Mother’s Rest, no one ap- Title: Make Me Author: Lee Child Publisher: Bantam RRP: $32.99
pears to know, but Reacher sniffs something is not right amid that “shared defensiveness’’, particularly when he sees one merchant reach for a phone.
And you will realise something is not right when Reacher is approached by a mysterious woman on a lonely railway platform. She soon reveals a colleague is missing – and away we go on an investigation that reveals crimes that are shocking, even by Reacher standards.
What starts as a probe into a missing person balloons into the unthinkable.
Lee Child’s novels have been consistently rating as number one sellers.
Make Me won’t disappoint.