Die Trying by Lee Child: A review

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Die Trying is the second in Lee Child's blood-spattered thriller series featuring his superman Jack Reacher. In this entry in the series a lot of the bloodletting is done by the bad guys rather than by Reacher. And they are very bad guys indeed.

Reacher becomes involved in this adventure while innocently walking down a street in Chicago. He encounters a young woman coming out of a dry cleaner's shop with several outfits in one of her arms and an aluminum crutch in the other arm. She is struggling to manage the door, the crutch, and the clothes and drops the crutch. Reacher stops to help and as he returns her crutch to her, the two find themselves confronted by two armed men. By the curb is a car with a third man as driver. They are forced into the car by the men, the victims of a broad daylight kidnapping.

The two are then transferred into a paneled van and a long trip across country begins. Since the van is closed, they have no idea which way they are headed or why. Why have they been kidnapped?

It turns out that the young woman is an FBI agent with connections to some very high level people in the government. She was the target of the kidnapping. Jack Reacher was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The trip continues for days with the group stopping at night at abandoned farms. Reacher and Holly Johnson, the FBI agent, are handcuffed and locked in the barns at night. At one of the stops one night, one of the kidnappers decides to rape Holly. She fights back and Reacher manages to pull his chain out of the wall and attacks and kills the would-be rapist. He breaks out of the barn, hides the body in a ditch, and in the morning the trip continues after the other two kidnappers are unable to find their companion.

They are headed west and eventually they arrive at their destination, a desolate corner of Montana. This corner of Montana, it develops, is owned by the Montana Militia, an extremely violent, racist, secessionist, conspiracy theory-adhering group led by a cruel sociopath, that is intent on declaring independence from the United States and setting up their own state for white people only. These are the people in whose clutches Holly and Reacher find themselves. Their future does not look promising.

I read Die Trying while the United States was suffering through a government shutdown engineered by delusional right-wing bomb-throwers. It was stunning how statements by many of those modern-day bomb-throwers sounded as if they had come from the mouths of Child's fictional Militia members from the 1990s. They might have learned their lines from this book: There is a worldwide conspiracy to make the U.N. a world government and the president is part of that conspiracy. The black helicopters are coming to take people's guns and their liberties - of course, these people always equate guns with liberties. White people are being downtrodden and their rights abridged by the darker races. It is all a lot of utter nonsense, but there are elected representatives in this country who spout these lines with utter conviction and straight faces.

Child's portrayal of the militiamen actually seemed quite realistic to me and his writing about the FBI's structure and operations was interesting. His Jack Reacher continues to be blessed with the powers of a superhero. You feel that if he really wanted to he would be able to leap tall buildings - or mountains - in a single bound, but he meets his match here in Holly Johnson, who is every bit as capable of killing bare-handed or with weapons that she has fashioned out of the materials at hand as is Reacher. Together, even with Holly injured and using a crutch, they are a formidable team.

One can be assured that in these thrillers the bad guys are always going to be punished and there is a degree of guilty satisfaction in that. But the stories also require that a lot of innocent people are punished, too, often in quite cruel ways that are difficult to read about. That cruelty, of course, is what makes the punishment of the bad guys acceptable.

Another thing one can be sure of is that there will be non-stop action from the first page to the last. Reading these books is a bit of a roller coaster ride, sometimes heart-stopping, always entertaining.

View all my reviews

Poetry Sunday: Don't Hesitate by Mary Oliver

How about we share another Mary Oliver poem? After all, you can never have too many of those. In this one, the poet seems to acknowledge that it is often hard to simply live in and enjoy the moment, perhaps because we are afraid it can't last. She urges us to give in to that moment and fully experience the joy. Although "much can never be redeemed, still, life has some possibility left." Don't Hesitate by Mary Oliver If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is no...

Poetry Sunday: Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney

My mother was a farm wife and a prodigious canner. She canned fruit and vegetables from the garden, even occasionally meat. But the best thing that she canned, in my opinion, was blackberry jam. Even as I type those words my mouth waters! Of course, before she could make that jam, somebody had to pick the blackberries. And that somebody was quite often named Dorothy. I think Seamus Heaney might have spent some time among the briars plucking those delicious black fruits as well, so he would have known that "Once off the bush the fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour." They don't keep; you have to get that jam made in a hurry! Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust ...

Poetry Sunday: Hymn for the Hurting by Amanda Gorman

You probably remember poet Amanda Gorman from her appearance at the inauguration of President Biden. She read her poem "The Hill We Climb" on that occasion. After the senseless slaughter in Uvalde this week, she was inspired to write another poem which was published in The New York Times. It seemed perfect for the occasion and so I stole it in order to feature it here, just in case you didn't get a chance to read it in the Times . Hymn for the Hurting by Amanda Gorman Everything hurts, Our hearts shadowed and strange, Minds made muddied and mute. We carry tragedy, terrifying and true. And yet none of it is new; We knew it as home, As horror, As heritage. Even our children Cannot be children, Cannot be. Everything hurts. It’s a hard time to be alive, And even harder to stay that way. We’re burdened to live out these days, While at the same time, blessed to outlive them. This alarm is how we know We must be altered — That we must differ or die, That we must triumph or try. ...

The Nature of Things

Search This Blog