Jack Reacher on the road

A Wanted Man

By Lee Child, Bantam Press, 432 pages, £18.99

Who does Hollywood think is the best actor to play a 6-foot-5 (extreme) action hero resembling a “gorilla with its face smashed in”? Tom Cruise, of course. Bizarrely, it is the little scientologist who stars as Jack Reacher in the soon-to-be-released film based on Lee Child’s novel “One Shot”, which is the ninth in a series. But the book in question here is “A Wanted Man”, the 17th in the series. And it is another ripper.

Reacher, standing battered and bruised on a Nebraska highway in the dead of winter, is picked up by two men and a woman in a car. Going by the way they are dressed, he deduces that they are returning from some sort of a corporate team-building exercise. But this is a Lee Child novel after all, and nothing is as it seems. Reacher’s mathematical mind soon revises the deductions to conclude that something’s not quite right.

Meanwhile, a gruesome murder has occurred in rural Nebraska, and the FBI is on it. Cops are stopping cars on the highway to check. And yes, it is linked to the trio in the car.

Reacher, a former military policeman in the criminal investigation division, is at the wheel, having pitched in to help the tired Alan King and Don McQueen. It is while he drives, and they doze off, that the improbable blinking game begins between Reacher and the female passenger, Karen Delfuenso. Through a few winks and lip movements, she lets him know that she has been kidnapped.

For almost half the book, Reacher is in the car with the trio. This is also the most engrossing part of the novel. When they are out of the vehicle, Reacher is shot at but survives. The duo takes off with Karen in tow. Reacher’s heart can’t allow that, and he teams up with an attractive female FBI agent to solve the mystery, which culminates in a Hollywood-style shoot-out involving Reacher, as a one-man army, and foreign terrorists on American soil, at an abandoned Cold War-era base.

As a character, Reacher is unforgettable. His obsession with mathematics adds to the fun. Besides, Child has struck all the right notes in “A Wanted Man”. There is a sense of menace throughout the first part of the novel, with one surprise after another.

But Dolph Lundgren should have played Jack Reacher in the film.