Make Me by Lee Child****
Reading dates: 03 March – 08 April 2023
At a remote railroad stop on the prairie called Mother’s Rest, Jack Reacher finds a town full of silent, watchful people, and descends into the heart of darkness.
As I am nearing the end of the series (the ones written by Lee, not his brother Andrew), I appreciate it is more difficult to innovate, while keeping the integrity of the character and the setting. What I loved about Make Me is the fact that it contains all the best aspects of Reacher (competent female sidekick, kick ass, travel, small rural US town) with a topic that is both fascinating and gripping. I really did not see the twist coming on this one but once it was revealed it made complete sense as well as being informative about an area of life I am rather innocent. I will not reveal what it is as I think finding out is the best aspect of the novel and it is well crafted.
For me, Make Me has passages written by someone who is looking for something other than a good crime novel. there is a very nice description of a sunrise, for example and some other lengthy paragraphs that I have not experienced in previous novels. I really liked these even if they read tentative. There are however a few loose ends. This is normal, perhaps, as a completely closed novel, with no gaps and no macguffins would perhaps have been boring.
I have only 4 to go. Will I be able to tell when he is thinking about handing over to his brother? Do I detect the need to move on already here? Reacher gets a couple of health issues on this one (part of the unresolved threads) and it will be very interesting to read or, or rather whether, Reacher ages.
Learning from Reacher
Reacher’s humour
Reacher asked him, “You got a local phone book?” “What for?” “I want to balance it on my head to improve my deportment.” “What?” “I want to look up a number. What else is a phone book for?”
The cops would call them perpetrators. Their lawyers would call them clients. Politicians would call them scum. Criminologists would call them sociopaths. Sociologists would call them misunderstood. The 110th MP would call them dead men walking.
On intuition
The back part of my brain knows it was the same guy.” “How?” “The radio chatter is off the scale.” “You hear radio chatter?” “I listen out for it hard. We were wild animals for seven million years. We learned a lot of lessons. We should be careful not to lose them.
On the internet
The internet has no physical reality. It has no dimensions, and no boundaries. No up or down, no near or far. Although one might argue it has mass. Digital information is all ones and zeroes, which means memory cells are either charged or not charged. And charge is energy, if one believes Einstein’s e=mc2, where e is energy, and m is mass, and c, is the speed of light, then one must also believe that m equals e divided by c2, which is the same equation expressed differently, and which would imply that charge has detectable mass. The more songs and the more photos you put on your phone, the heavier it gets. Only by a trillion-billionth of the tiniest fraction of an ounce, but still.”
The old lady said, “He wanted to know why some web sites can’t be found. Which was fundamentally a question about search engines. His image of the swimming pool became useful. He imagined millions of tennis balls, some bobbing up on the water, some trapped deeper down by the weight of the others. So I asked him to imagine a search engine as a long silk ribbon, being pulled up and down and in and out, weaving through the balls every which way, sliding over their wet fuzzy surfaces at tremendous speed. And then to imagine that some balls had been adapted, to have spikes instead of fuzz, like fish hooks, and that other balls had been adapted to have no fuzz at all, to be completely smooth, like billiard balls. Where would the silk ribbon snag? On the spikes, of course. It would slide over the billiard balls completely. That’s what Peter needed to understand about search engines. It’s a two-way street. A web site must want to be found. It must work hard to develop effective spikes. People call it search engine optimization. It’s a very important discipline now. That said, it’s equally hard work to be a billiard ball. Staying secret isn’t easy either.”
Chang said, “Secret web sites imply illegality.”
“Indeed,” the old lady said. “Or immorality, I suppose. Or both at once. I’m naïve about such things, but one imagines pornography of the most unpleasant sort, or mail-order cocaine, and so forth. It’s called the Deep Web. All those smooth billiard balls. Millions of them. No spikes, no hooks, nothing but going about their business with no one watching. The Deep Web might be ten times bigger than the Surface Web. Or a hundred. Or more. No one knows. How could they? Not to be confused with the Dark Web, of course, which is merely out-of-date sites with broken links, like dead satellites whirling through space forever. Which makes the Dark Web more like ancient archaeology, and the Deep Web more like the wrong side of the tracks. Not that either one is actually dark or deep or either side of any actual tracks, you understand. The internet is not a physical place. There are no physical characteristics to it at all.
On aiming and shooting
So Reacher aimed. About ninety feet. He kept his focus tight on the front sight. A needle post in a hooded ring. He stared at its paint. At its every molecular pit and detail. Razor sharp. The rear sight was a blur. The target was a blur. For maximum accuracy. How he was trained. The front sight was everything. Eventually it would all come together. Blur, post, blur. And it did. Three things merged. Linear. Rock steady.
On sunrises (the literary paragraph)
From the metal walkway on top of the old concrete giant the dawn was vast, and remote, and infinitely slow. The eastern horizon was black as night, and it stayed that way, until at last a person with straining wide-open eyes might call it faintly gray, like the darkest charcoal, which lightened over long slow minutes, and spread, side to side and wafer-thin, and upward, like tentative fingers on some outer layer of the atmosphere, impossibly distant, the stratosphere perhaps, as if light traveled faster there, or got there sooner.
The edge of the world crept into view, at least to the straining wide-open eyes, limned and outlined in gray on gray, infinitely dim, infinitely subtle, hardly there at all, part imagination, and part hope. Then pale gold fingers probed the gray, moving, ethereal, as if deciding. And then spreading, igniting some thin and distant layer one molecule at a time, one lumen, lighting it up slowly, turning it luminous and transparent, the glass of the bowl, not white and cold, but tinted warmer.
The light stayed wan, but reached further, every new minute, until the whole sky was gold, but pale, not enough to see by, too weak to cast the faintest shadow. Then warmer streaks bloomed, and lit the horizon, and finally the sun rose, unstoppable, for a second as red and angry as a sunset, then settling to a hot yellow blaze, half-clearing the horizon, and throwing immediate shadows, at first perfectly horizontal, then merely miles long. The sky washed from pale gold to pale blue, down through all the layers, so the world above looked newly deep as well as infinitely high and infinitely wide. The night dew had settled the dust, and until it dried the air was crystal. The view was pure and clear in every direction.
Previous reviews of the Jack Reacher series
#1 Killing Floor ***
Jack Reacher gets off a bus in a small town in Georgia. And is thrown into the county jail, for a murder he didn’t commit.
#2 Die Trying ***
Reacher is locked in a van with a woman claiming to be FBI. And ferried right across America into a brand new country.
#3 Tripwire **
Reacher is digging swimming pools in Key West when a detective comes round asking questions. Then the detective turns up dead.
#4 The Visitor ***
Two naked women found dead in a bath filled with paint. Both victims of a man just like Reacher.
#5 Echo Burning ***
In the heat of Texas, Reacher meets a young woman whose husband is in jail. When he is released, he will kill her.
#6 Without Fail ****
A Washington woman asks Reacher for help. Her job? Protecting the Vice President.
#7 Persuader ****
A kidnapping in Boston. A cop dies. Has Reacher lost his sense of right and wrong?
#8 The Enemy ***
Back in Reacher’s army days. a general is found dead on his watch.
#9 One Shot *** (2012)
A lone sniper shoots five people dead in a heartland city. But the accused guy says, ‘Get Reacher’.
#10 The Hard Way ***
A coffee on a busy New York street leads to a shoot-out three thousand miles away in the Norfolk countryside.
#11 Bad Luck and Trouble ***
One of Reacher’s buddies has shown up dead in the California desert, and Reacher must put his old army unit back together.
#12 Nothing to Lose **
Reacher crosses the line between a town called Hope and one named Despair.
#13 Gone Tomorrow ****
On the New York subway, Reacher counts down the twelve tell-tale signs of a suicide bomber.
#14 61 hours ****
In freezing South Dakota, Reacher hitches a lift on a bus heading for trouble.
#15 Worth Dying For ***
Reacher runs into a clan that’s terrifying the Nebraska locals, but it’s the unsolved case of a missing child that he can’t let go.
#16 The Affair ****
Six months before the events in Killing Floor, Major Jack Reacher of the US Military Police goes undercover in Mississippi, to investigate a murder.
#17 A Wanted Man *****
A freshly-busted nose makes it difficult for Reacher to hitch a ride. When at last he’s picked up by two men and a woman, it soon becomes clear they have something to hide.
#18 Never Go Back *****
When Reacher returns to his old Virginia headquarters he is accused of a sixteen-year-old homicide and hears these words: ‘You’re back in the army, Major. And your ass is mine.’
#19 Personal ****
Someone has taken a shot at the French president. Only one man could have done it – and Reacher is the one man who can find him.
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