Never beyond his reach

Jack Reacher: One Shot

By Lee Child,

Bantam, 496 pages, £7.99

It was one of those rare occasions, when a Hollywood film based on a novel does some justice to the book. But the timing of the release couldn’t have been worse for the directors of “One Shot”, the Tom Cruise thriller based on Lee Child’s novel of the same name. It came out just days after the awful shootings in Connecticut wherein a deranged young man stormed into the Sandy Hook Elementary School and mowed down 26 people, including 20 children aged six to seven, before turning the gun on himself.

The opening scene in the book, which is the ninth of Child’s 17 Jack Reacher novels so far, is its most dramatic. A man parks his car in a building parking lot in a small town in Indiana, takes out his sniper’s rifle, and fires six shots, instantly killing five apparently random people in a plaza on the opposite side. And drives away.

For police detective Emerson, it is the perfect open-and-shut case. The killer has left behind a mountain of evidence linking him to the crime.

Ex-military sniper Jack Barr is swiftly apprehended while asleep in his home. After a detailed interrogation, he says only one thing: “Get Reacher for me.”

Now, Jack Reacher — a former military policeman in the criminal investigation division — is the last man Jack Barr would want fetched. The trigger-happy Barr has sniped people down before, years ago in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1991. And Reacher was on his case, which got brushed under the carpet by army bureaucracy. Reacher had promised Barr he would destroy him if he ever did it again.

But no one finds Reacher; it is Reacher who finds you. He makes detective Emerson’s job much, much easier by taking a bus to Indiana after hearing about the case on the evening news. He offers to help nail down Barr.

Meanwhile, Helen, an attractive young lawyer, has decided to defend Barr, to the chagrin of her father, who is the District Attorney. She convinces Reacher to see the evidence and once he does, he is in turn convinced that the evidence is perfect — a bit too perfect. Barr has been set up.

But by whom and why? Enter the local Russian mob. They also do their best to make Reacher leave the small town. In one of the more enjoyable scenes in the novel, he is cornered by five small-time goons. The leader of the pack tells him that it is five against one. “Three against one,” corrects Reacher, as the last two always cut and run. And proceeds to pummel the first three.

You would think Tom Cruise would be the last man to play Reacher, the 6 foot-5 action hero resembling a “gorilla with its face smashed in”. But, according to Lee Child, Cruise had the talent to make an effective Reacher. He also said: “Reacher’s size in the books is a metaphor for an unstoppable force, which Cruise portrays in his own way ... With another actor you might get 100 per cent of the height but only 90 per cent of Reacher. With Tom, you’ll get 100 per cent of Reacher with 90 per cent of the height.”

“One Shot” is a novel of pure escape, a typical Lee Child page-turner. But as with the latest Reacher book, “A Wanted Man”, the ending is way too dramatised and unrealistic, with Reacher heading to the bad guys’ den, where a million shots are fired and all the bad guys end up very dead.

One Shot by Lee Child is available at Jashanmal stores in the UAE.