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If anyone can tell me who hired the 'watchers' whose activities open Echo Burning, and why I'd be very grateful.
It's a fair question because those characters are established early on, returned to a few times and then dropped ~ they were replaced by the "killing crew". I don't have the novel here and I've been through Killing Floor since, but I assume they were hired by Sloop's old buddy, the police chief (?) as part of a plan to kidnap Ellie, as leverage to get Carmen to kill Sloop. That I can't quite remember isn't a big vote for Child's plotting in that novel, I agree.
I think Thorn raises some good objections. I've found the big revenge climax quite disappointing in every Reacher novel so far ~ the last three chapters are always taken up with him finally taking out the bad guys, just as there's always a scene earlier on to whet the appetite and keep up the reader's lust for righteous, rough justice where Reacher takes out two (almost always) thugs with his bare hands or an improvised prop. The climax is usually on an overblown, action-movie scale somehow (attacked by tanks in The Enemy, burning a pile of a million dollar bills in Killing Floor, torching the red ranch in Echo Burning, taking out an office in the WTC in Tripwire, storming a peninsula mansion in Persuader, racing cross-country after the assassins in Without Fail) and it's always preceded by Reacher telling us grimly, despite the odds against him, that the perps are "dead as a man who's just stepped off a building... walking dead men." Unfortunately, as Reacher's such a superman, it's rare that we feel any risk or danger in these scenes ~ any possibility that he's not going to succeed. Tripwire and Persuader come closest because he gets badly wounded, but in the others it just feels like a done deal.
There is also a lot of superfluous, banal detail in the last two Reachers I read ~ Killing Floor and Echo Burning ~ just tedious information about how the town is laid out, how many kilometres it was from here to there, and how much faster he made the journey in this vehicle rather than that one, because of the fuel consumption and the height of the vehicle off the ground; what he thought about while he was waiting for hours, how he used the can and took a long shower, what kind of eggs he had in the evening and where exactly in the car he stored the bags of salted nuts and bottles of water. Stuff that contributes to Reacher's in some ways dully obsessive, careful character, but becomes a drag to read. In Killing Floor there's this dead pair of pages about the Coast Guard's operation and how the upcoming election is going to affect it, and you just know this is going to be a big plot point later because Child has basically typed out a whole newspaper story, but you're meant to forget it and think "oh yeah" when the story crops up again two hundred pages later. |
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