It’s a Mystery: “If you don’t know the trouble you’re in, keep Reacher by your side”

The Sentinel
By Lee Child and Andrew Child
Delacorte, 2020

It’s going on midnight on a Saturday night when Jack Reacher alights from a bus at the Greyhound station in a small town just outside of Nashville, Tennessee. As always, Reacher, ex-MP and peripatetic knight-errant, is in no hurry. He has no particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there. He has no appointments to keep. No scores to settle. Not yet anyway. As is his wont, he’s carrying only cash, a toothbrush and his passport. And at six feet five, 250 pounds, he is always a force to be reckoned with. Plus, if you are following the chronology, the former military cop turns 60 this year.

The Sentinel is the 25th in the series and the first to be coauthored with Child’s younger brother, Andrew. Thus, the writing style is ever-so-slightly different (Child’s writing is terser than Child and his brother) but the story is just as powerful. As it begins, Reacher leaves the bus station in search of a hot meal. He’s attracted to the live music coming from a small bar and settles in hoping for some coffee and a burger. The bar offers neither but the music is surprisingly good and, as it turns out, the musicians could use his help (this is Jack Reacher). They got stiffed by the owner, Derek Lockhart, and one band member had his guitar destroyed by a hulk of a bouncer. 

So Reacher intervenes in his inimitable badass style coupled with a warning to Lockhart:

Every band member I represent has me on speed dial. If anything happens to any of them, I’ll come back here. I’ll break your arms. I’ll break your legs. And I’ll hang your underwear from the ceiling of the bar. While you’re still wearing it. Are we clear? 

Message received sharp and straightforward, Reacher prepares to get out of town pronto. That’s when he practically runs into a man wandering into an ambush that Reacher sees coming a mile away. (It isn’t that he looks for trouble but when he encounters it, which is often the case, he certainly doesn’t walk away.) There’s a line from The Sentinel that epitomizes him: “Someone had sent six guys after [Reacher]. It would be wrong to let the day end with only two of them in the hospital.”

So, once again, Reacher butts in with his trademark brand of conflict resolution. The man he saves is Rusty Rutherford, an IT manager who tells Reacher he was recently fired for a cyber-attack that locked up the town’s data, records, information…and secrets. Swearing he’s innocent, he wants to stay and clear his name. This is the stuff that’s right up Reacher’s alley so he decides to lend a hand (more like a fist).

Naturally, there’s more to the story. As it unfolds, Reacher finds a massive conspiracy run rampant. The bad guys who jumped Rutherford are part of something serious and deadly, involving a dangerous cover-up and murder. Capitalizing on his size and intensity (a controlled rage bottled up in the form of a sledgehammer) we are reminded once again why Reacher is one of the coolest characters to ever wander around a topnotch thriller like this one.

The Sentinel is fresh, lands a lot of unexpected punches and keeps you on edge to the very end. It’s a compulsively readable thriller that proves the series is primed to continue on at the highest level for many years to come.

—Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.