(Spoilers)
Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child was chosen by the Wednesday Whodunit mystery book discussion group to discuss on April 3, 2013. In great contrast to the last book discussed, Broken by Karin Fossum, Gone Tomorrow is a fast-paced action thriller, a mystery of international intrigue starring the larger-than-life former Army M.P., Jack Reacher. The book is around 380 pages long and has over 80 short chapters. Each one kind of ends on a cliffhanger that made me want keep reading. Around the time I heard we planned to read the book, I also heard that a movie called Jack Reacher was coming out in December 2012 and starring Tom Cruise as the title character. I believe it's based on a different book from Gone Tomorrow. After reading Gone Tomorrow, I don't see Reacher as looking like Tom Cruise. I can see him as played by someone bigger such as Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) or maybe Jason Statham. The mystery in Gone Tomorrow gets more and more complex as the story develops bringing in U.S. senators, the Department of Defense, and international militants. It also gets very violent and too graphic for my tastes. But I enjoyed reading about how Reacher sorted out the mysteries.
Most of the story takes place in New York City with some scenes in Washington D.C. and North Carolina. Though he doesn't formally live anywhere, Reacher knows NYC very well and through his descriptions, I learned about the city. He knows many facts about lots of things usually military such as the 10-point of suicide bomber characters and the newest subway cars. About New York he mentions that odd numbered streets run east to west while even numbered streets run west to east. Places he mentions include Penn station, Union Square, and "Herald Square which is where Sixth Avenue and Broadway and 34th Street all meet. By day it's a zoo. Macy's is there." (p. 318) Reacher is a real minimalist survivor. Everything he needs fits in his pants pockets. He also has ways of getting inexpensive uses of hotel rooms. At one point he states, "Big hotels are rarely 100% full. And big hotels never treat their maids very well. Therefore, the woman was happy to take thirty bucks in cash and a 30-minute break." (p. 91)
There were a few relatable references. Reacher and Jacob Mark are able to identify the unmarked police vehicles parked near the station such as the Impalas and the Crown Vics. My wife and I are fans of older 1980s Impalas, because of the band named Tame Impala. After Reacher asks her about what was found written in Susan Mark's car, Theresa Lee answers by "reaching behind her and pulling a small notebook out of her pocket. Not official police issue. It had a stiff blackboard cover and an elastic strap that held it closed. The whole book was slightly curled like it spent a lot of time in her pocket" (p. 83). This reminds me of the Moleskine notebooks. I call them "manly notebooks" because a pamphlet in one that I got said that modern Moleskine notebooks are the successors to the "legendary notebooks used by artists and thinkers over the past two centuries: among them Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin." Much later in Gone Tomorrow, Reacher mentions that the SAS in Britain developed a tactic of rappelling off roofs into upper-story windows (p. 344). I'm not sure what SAS stands for but I don't think it's the same as a well-known statistical software package.
The book taught me one new word: fricative as in voiced dental fricative (p. 355). From the context it seems to be when Reacher hears Lila over the phone say the first consonant of a word and then stop. What she is about to say does turn out to be important (e.g. there is one more member of their crew). The word fricative wasn't in my 1992 Random House dictionary. I had to go to www.merriam-webster.com to find it defined as "a consonant characterized by frictional passage of the expired breath through a narrowing at some point in the vocal tract."
Jack Reacher is probably one of the strongest or toughest detectives/protagonists we've read about. He almost seems superhuman, able to overpower three ex-military federal agents at one point and take on two militants armed with knives at another. His only weakness seems to be lack of technical knowledge. He visits an internet café and describes how internet cafes are dying off since people can usually access the internet through their mobile devices. I can see how Tom Cruise could portray his cocky but not completely serious "know it all" attitude. Reacher has a lot of intelligence for a former M.P. We as readers don't learn too much about his background. Maybe that's explored more in other books. He does mention a line his brother used to say when they were kids: "Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in his shoes. Then when you start criticizing him, you're a mile away and he's got to run after you in his socks." (p. 184) I wonder if many ex-military do live on the road off their pension twenty or so years before normal retirement age. As Theresa Lee tells Reacher, "It's different for you. You can be gone tomorrow. I can't. I live here." (p. 259)
Despite his larger-than-life strength and intelligence I still often found the book fun to read from Reacher's first person point of view. I especially liked following his deductive process such as at the beginning as he figures out who the feds are who question him. "After the second hour tacked onto the first I figured they must be coming all the way from D.C., which implied a small, specialist outfit. Anyone else would have a field office closer to hand." (p. 36) Later I liked how he read about Samson and was able to infer things from his biography such as the medal awarded for Special Forces operations. It was also pretty ingenious how Reacher was able to find the Hoths in the cheap hotel he stayed at earlier in the book and later in their hideout. But he's not the only one who could deduce things. Svetlana Hoth tells him, "You don't have it but you know where it is. Therefore you employed a deductive process." (p. 377)
I liked how it has hard to tell the motivations of the other characters and how they lied or hid information from Reacher, that he has to figure out later. This makes for some interesting twists. He could never get those feds to show ID. I kind of liked the character Springfield or Browning because I was never sure if he was helping or impeding. That was also funny how Samson's wife got Reacher to buy clothes he didn't need.
Gone Tomorrow is a fun, fast and exciting read, both a mystery and a suspense thriller. It may not be completely realistic but that doesn't make it any less fun to read. Reacher also knows a lot of information about New York, military operations, and even subway cars, that I enjoyed reading. My copy of the book had the first chapter of Child's next book, A Wanted Man, but I can wait a bit before reading another Lee Child mystery.
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