Book Review: Chain Reaction by Lee Child & Andrew Child

It’s Reacher time again. Last year, I said that Exit Strategy was enjoyable but also left me hoping for more. This year, I got more. Indeed, as the first novel that Lee Child has avowed was wholly written by Andrew, Chain Reaction marks something of a coming of age by the younger Child sibling. Because if you’d told me this was a work entirely by Reacher’s inventor, I’d have believed you without question. This is peak Reacher.

A fan favourite from 2013’s Never Go Back, Susan Turner is now a One-Star General overseeing a new unit described as ‘the army’s own FBI’. But she has a problem: one of her cybercrime investigators, John Bisley, has just been stabbed to death while investigating a Colorado town home to five data centres, a gigantic solar field, a motel and a diner. And a lot of gravel.

You’d think that having 1,000 people in an elite army crime-fighting unit under her, Turner would be uniquely well-placed to handle the issue. But no. Because the only way someone could have known Bisley’s whereabouts is if they were inside the unit’s system. She has a traitor and no way of knowing who.

Thankfully, she also has a way of finding Jack Reacher who is conveniently in need of a new ATM card. Once reunited, Turner and Reacher embark on an off-the-books investigation of their own that first debunks the traitor theory, then uncovers the real enemy: a pair of silicone valley superstar tech bros in charge of a flourishing AI startup called Everything Everywhere Forever.

Having to take down would-be assassins at every step, flying back and forth cross-country to protect themselves and Bisley’s widow and baby, unravelling a criminal undertaking of outstanding audacity, and finally destroying a private army before the inevitable tech-bro-takedown, Chain Reaction is the kind of action thriller that takes those of us who yearn for the golden age of action thrillers back to those heady times.

The pacing is excellent, the dialogue peppered with more than enough excellent one-liners to make us overlook spots of woodenness, and even the incredibly cringeworthy sex scenes are acceptable since they’re the verbal equivalent of every sex scene Steven Seagal ever acted in.

It’s hard to make a claim that Reacher novels are more than good, old-fashioned light entertainment. But I’m going to try. Reacher is a reminder that in a world pretending to be brand new all the time, human beings are far more analogue than digital, and far more classical than quantum. For me, that’s a reminder with value. But you don’t need to agree or care, because Chain Reaction is definitely great old-fashioned entertainment.