The twelfth and latest of the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child. As usual, this tale finds Jack dragged into another situation where life and death are on the line and the bad guys are trying to keep him away from the truth.

Jack finds himself between two remote towns in Colorado: Hope and Despair. Despair being on his route he heads in to town to grab a bite to eat and to find a place to stay for the night. Instead, he is arrested, charged with vagrancy and deposited on the town border with instructions to go back to Hope. Intrigued and angry he decides to investigate and finds a lot that doesn’t add up - a town that is entirely owned by one man, a populace who seem happy to be owned and will fight to keep it that way and young women arriving secretly and leaving secretly looking for their men. In the end he will be forced to make hard decisions and risk it all.

Pretty much par for the course in any of these novels, Reacher is always one man against the machine. He is a likeable character, pretty near invulnerable, just smart enough to be one of us and just dumb enough to not be an out and out genius. The story has plenty of action and plenty of mystery to make it engaging and fun to read. I suppose.

So what went wrong? Reading the novel felt like a bit of a struggle to me. In places it almost seemed like it wasn’t part of the loose series. There isn’t any one thing I could put my finger on: there are lots of points in the story where Reacher is asked to take a look at himself and see what others see - on older man, scruffy, weather beaten with no home or belongings. While Child put the same energy into the fight scenes, Reacher seemed tired. Possibly, and I may be reading too much into it, Child is wearying of the character - maybe the author needs to take a break and/or write about a new character.

This isn’t enough to turn me off the series, overall they are just far too much fun to read. Reacher is the approachable loner, the maverick who cares about everybody if he meets them for more than a few minutes. If you are new to the series, don’t read this first - it deals with bigger events than those in the towns and these don’t always translate well to thsi character - pick up one of the earlier novels and start from there.