Nearly unreadable...
2
By A. S. Kaku
...and I don’t say that lightly. I wanted to give the transition a chance. After all, I’d just started reading the series in late October 2023, and was looking forward to not running out of fun reading material for a while. But “The Sentinel” gave me pause, with its unimaginative plot. “Huh, ripped from the headline,” I’d thought. “Don’t think I ever saw that in a Reacher novel.” The style was gone too. Instead of the musical, whippy prose I’d grown to admire, “The Sentinel” adopted a more staccato yet droning quality. By that time, I’d read 24 Reacher novels and one short story collection in under 10 weeks, so I was in a good position to notice the change. Rebooted into the Mashable-grist plot and reimagined by a new clomping voice, Reacher has become...ordinary.
I figured the first book was a gimme, and immediately plunged into “Better Off Dead.” It is, as stated, nearly unreadable. The pointless fragmentation of sentences is in full force. People. Do this. On Instagram. A lot. Too. And I have no idea what they think they’re achieving. Reacher has morphed into just a big dude moved by conventional loyalties and wisdom, and there’s a welter of unconvincing telling, not showing, of his smarts. Faint nods are given to Reacher character tics we’ve come to know, like his preoccupation with prime numbers—but so phoned in that you wonder if the new author just doesn’t get what that feels like, that pleasure Reacher takes in pattern recognition.
I don’t know what happened. Conan Doyle could kill Holmes but bowed to public pressure and resuscitated him. Maybe today’s authors have publishing contracts that require a “use it or lose it” approach to valuable franchises. Whatever the case, I wish the Childs well. Thank you, L.C., for a wonderful 2 1/2 months.
