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A review of Without Fail

by Lee Child

Former MP Jack Reacher is drafted to assassinate the Vice-President of the United States...by the Secret Service.

Reviewed by: Michael J. Griffin
About Michael J. Griffin

Without Fail Imagine being asked to assassinate the Vice President of the United States...by the very people that are supposed to be protecting him. Former Military Policeman Jack Reacher is faced with that situation when Secret Service agent M.E. Froelich (she won't reveal what the 'M.E.' stands for) asks him to join their entourage.

Reacher isn't supposed to actually kill the vice-president, of course. He's just supposed to find the holes in security and point them out to Froelich, since the Vice-President has received a lot of threats while he is conducting his campaign for the presidency. The fact that these threats appear in his office and in the Secret Service office point to an inside job.

Of course these situations are never simple. Froelich is the former girlfriend of Reacher's brother, who was killed in the first Reacher novel, Killing Floor. She still has strong emotional ties to the brother, and transfers her feelings onto Reacher.

Reacher is a very intelligent man, but even he realizes he needs help, and he brings in another former military officer, Frances Neagly. Together, they hunt down the people who are threatening the vice-president, and like all Child thrillers, ends with a showdown that had me turning the pages very quickly.

I've read all of Child's books since finding "Killing Floor" in the basement of my building, and have to say that I found this one to be one of Child's best in terms of plot, pacing and characters. He shows Reacher to be much more than a brooding loner and even the bad guys seem real. I'm finding that Reacher, a former MP officer who roams from place to place with nothing more than money in his pocket, is one of the most complex characters since John Sandford's Lucas Davenport.

Child is becoming one of the few authors that I buy in hardcover.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Without Fail

Copyright © by Michael J. Griffin, 2002

Reviewed by Michael J. Griffin:
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