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Jack Reacher is dead. That's not a spoiler. He's alive and kicking at the end of this book. But I think he's dead to me. I tried to give Andrew Grant a fair shake. When he transitioned into the writer's chair for this series with The Sentinel I thought he did a decent job and that most importantly, Reacher was the character that his brother Lee Child had created and written for so many years. Things have gotten decidedly worse from there though. I wasn't a fan of the previous book in this series and with No Plan B, Andrew has really done some harm to this series.

This just isn't a Reacher book. It's an Andrew Grant book with Reacher in it--or maybe the shadow of Reacher.

There is a basic formula to the Reacher books. It's a Shane-like formula. Reacher comes into town, something shady is going on and Reacher fights on the side of angels to save the day. It's not complicated. There are some deviations over the course of the series, but almost always, the action starts early and before you know it Reacher is the the middle of things again. Grant/Andrew Child walks away from that successful formula. This book starts with the bad guys in a meeting, then flips to 3 days prior to the meeting, then moves ahead in time again. Reacher is in the first 175 pages of this book less than in any Reacher book in the series. Instead we get side story about a runaway, we get a side story about the bad guys and we get a side story about another bad guy who has nothing to do with the main bad guys (until later).

Grant moves back and forth between all of these stories and only the Reacher parts are interesting but even those feel a bit cheap and forced. It isn't until the very end when all of the various parties in this story come together and then the book rushes to a conclusion which has some action but nothing I found fun or interesting.

Then there were the silly inconsistencies. For the entire series, Reacher can set his internal alarm clock and wake up exactly at that time. Ridiculous? Sure. But it's canon in this series. It's what Reacher does. But in this book another character has to wake him up at 7:30 a.m. Little things like that make a difference to long time readers.

This book had a terrible pace, a story that wasn't at all compelling and characters who were bland and uninteresting. Reacher was a shadow of his normally enigmatic self. I think I'm going to pretend that Reacher is dead and not continue on in this series. I tried to give Andrew a fair shake and I think that 3 books in, ratings of 3 then 2 then 1 star tell the story of a failed experiment. As Lee becomes more and more hands off, Andrew drives the series further and further into the ground.

It sucks to say, but Jack Reacher is dead. He didn't survive the handoff from brother to brother. Because this is not a Reacher book. It's just a cash-grab in his name. In case it's not obvious, this is a 1-star book and I most definitely do not recommend you read it.