Nothing to Lose - A Review

Nothing to Lose is the latest of Lee Child's novels featuring Jack Reacher, an ex-MP turned wanderer. Reacher is forcibly removed from the town of Despair, Colorado on a charge of vagrancy and quickly forms a bond with a female deputy from neighboring Hope. You heard me right - Hope and Despair, one good town, one 'bad'.

I'm not going to beat around the bush. This was awful tripe, a true waste of my time. I was so very bitter when I looked up and saw I was on page 357, with fifty more to go. "Why are you reading it then?", my nephew asked.

"Inertia," I replied.

Lee Child is a hell of a writer. It might seem odd given this mess, but he is. The man can craft a sentence that will make you weep. But that's irrelevant here, like saying a batter has a pretty swing as he goes 0-4.

Forget about the cheesy Hope/Despair thing, which was actually explained cleverly. The plot here is non-existent for most of the novel and then haphazardly latches onto a dastardly deed so ludicrous it wouldn't pass muster on an episode of Voltron. 

Near the end of the book Reacher launches into a strident anti-Iraq War, anti-Washington spiel. You would think that alone would ruin the book for a Republican like me, but you'd be wrong. Child has a right to his goofy opinions, which thankfully are expressed so poorly as to tick off even the leftists he's courting. That's not the problem.

Political rants are fine. Breaching a characters 'self' is not. Reacher's father was a Marine, his Mother a member of the French resistance.He spent 13 years in uniform as an MP. Time and again he has stepped forth as a champion of the military structure and attention to duty.

It is therefore impossible for me to believe that Reacher would abandon all of that, ALL of that, to aid illegal and arguably traitorous activity that is detrimental to the United States military.

I have also had ethical concerns about this series for some time as Reacher descended more and more into caricature. He is now pompous, all-knowing, and apparently invulnerable to attack as he quickly dispatches six men at once in one scene. He burns down a police station for reasons that boil down to nothing more than his own ego and destroys the town police force. He injures a man so severely as to put him near death and shrugs off the wounds.

Throughout the book he comes across as an oversized bully, throwing threats of violence and harassment around, and why? Because he was (correctly) classified as a vagrant and asked to leave town.

I hesitate to even bring up the strident anti-Christian bent of the book. I'm Catholic and put about as much thought into the Book of Revelation as I do the owner's manual of my vacuum cleaner, but I do not appreciate the constant  ridicule of fundamentalist Christians in Child's work.

At one point he dares a preacher to commit suicide and when he does not (duh!) he calls him a coward and a hypocritical non-believer. What f*ed up philosophy is floating in Child/Reacher's head to explain that? Will Child follow up with a book slamming the 'Religion of Peace',  Islam? Let's see if he has the guts for that.

1 star out of 4, 20 out of 100.