Chain Reaction (Jack Reacher 31)Audiobook

Lee Child, Andrew Child

Four people, five data centres and a general who cannot trust her own deputy

General Susan Turner needs somebody who does not exist on any org chart. Somebody who worked for her has been killed on covert duty, the killing was not clean and it was not random, and she cannot use anyone inside her own building because she no longer knows who is reporting to whom. So she goes looking for the one man who is famously hard to find, and who solves problems and then disappears before anyone can thank him.

Reacher ends up in Summertown, Colorado, which is less a town than a set of installations with a postcode: a diner, a motel, five enormous data centres and two solar farms humming in the dust, with a permanent population of four. Somebody there is watching him from the moment he arrives. The pleasure of this book is watching a man who is very good at one thing walk into a place built by people who are very good at a different one, and finding out which skill turns out to matter.

Audiobook review by Emma Lawson

★★★★☆

Reacher in a data centre town, which is as strange as it sounds

Thirty-one books in, the Reacher formula is not a secret: a stranger arrives, something is wrong, the local power structure underestimates him, and the last act is a reckoning. The interest is in what the brothers Child do with the setting, and Summertown, Colorado is one of their better ideas in years: four residents, five data centres, two solar farms and nothing else for miles. It is a company town where the company does not employ people, and the book has real fun with how sinister that is. Scott Brick, who has been the voice of this series for years, reads it with the flat calm that makes the violence land harder when it comes.

The premise gets Reacher out of his usual orbit without breaking him. He is not a hacker and he is not going to become one: the plot asks him to do the thing he actually does, which is read a room, notice who is lying and refuse to be intimidated by money. The technical material is handled the way the series handles everything, from the outside and with contempt for jargon, so you never feel like you are being lectured at by a consultant.

Susan Turner is the best returning character in these later books, and giving her the opening chapters is smart. She is competent and cornered, and the sequence where she works out that her own deputy is a problem is the tensest thing in the first third. Andrew Child writes her more warmly than his father would have, and this is one of the places where the partnership shows to its advantage.

The action, when it comes, is small-scale and nasty rather than spectacular, which is the right register for a story about infrastructure. There is a fight in a corridor that lasts about four minutes of listening and manages to be genuinely unpleasant, and a late sequence with a vehicle that had me sitting up. Brick does not dramatise any of it, and the restraint is exactly why it works: he reads violence like a man describing weather.

Where it wobbles is the middle. There is a stretch where Reacher is doing reconnaissance, and reconnaissance in a town with four people means a lot of conversations that exist to place pieces. The book is twelve and a half hours and could comfortably have been eleven, and if you know a lot of Reacher you will spot the informant early, which takes some of the sting out of the reveal. It is not a fatal problem: the last two hours are as good as anything in the recent entries.

For anyone who has never read one, this is a perfectly workable entry point, since the series runs on the man rather than on continuity. For the regulars, it is a solid mid-table Reacher with an unusually good setting and a satisfyingly petty final move. The site has two recent ones to compare, The Secret and In Too Deep, and the consensus among listeners is that this one is a bit tighter than both.

Lee Child Andrew Child Chain Reaction Jack Reacher Scott Brick free audiobook

Chain Reaction is the thirty-first Jack Reacher novel from Lee Child and Andrew Child. General Susan Turner, deep inside the Pentagon, needs someone outside the system: a member of her team has been murdered on covert duty and she cannot trust anyone around her. She finds Reacher, who ends up in Summertown, Colorado, a town of four people, five data centres and two solar farms, where somebody is already watching him. Twelve hours and twenty-nine minutes, read by Scott Brick.

With the trial you spend it on whichever title you like, this one included, and you can cancel from your account in a couple of clicks. The title you take stays in your library even if you cancel, so nothing disappears at the end of the period. Playback speed, the sleep timer and picking up exactly where you stopped all work the way you would expect.

Twelve and a half hours is standard Reacher length and the format suits it: short chapters, a lot of dialogue, and a narrator who has been doing this voice long enough that it feels like the character rather than a performance. If you are new to the series you can start here without losing anything. If you are not, you already know whether you are going to spend a credit on it.

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