{"id":7198,"date":"2018-12-22T08:03:25","date_gmt":"2018-12-22T13:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/?p=7198"},"modified":"2018-12-22T08:03:25","modified_gmt":"2018-12-22T13:03:25","slug":"night-school-by-lee-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/22\/night-school-by-lee-child\/","title":{"rendered":"“Night School” by Lee Child"},"content":{"rendered":"

Copyright 2016 by Lee Child, published by Delacorte Press.<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the 21st book in the Jack Reacher series.\u00a0 I like all of the Jack Reacher books.\u00a0 He is larger than life, sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, always analytical and never predictable.\u00a0 All of which makes for a good read.<\/p>\n

In Night School<\/em> he is in the army – which is somewhat confusing as he had mustered out in some of the earlier books.\u00a0 Apparently these stories are not chronological.\u00a0 But they almost always stand on their own, so it is not a fatal flaw.\u00a0 At some point maybe I will try to go back and put them in sequence.\u00a0 But not today.<\/p>\n

The premise of this one is that Reacher has been ordered back to the classroom, ostensibly to learn about the latest developments in interagency cooperation.\u00a0 But it is a cover, of course, for a clandestine operation.\u00a0 A small group, consisting initially of a CIA agent, an FBI agent and an MP (Reacher) has been assembled to look into an alarming report of\u00a0 possible terrorist activity in Germany.\u00a0 It quickly develops that an AWOL soldier is selling something to a terrorist group for $100 million.\u00a0 The question is what.\u00a0 What could a lowly soldier from a mundane unit in Germany have acquired that could command that price?\u00a0 What could interest a terrorist group for that kind of money?\u00a0 It has to be small (because a single man stole it) and simple (because it can’t require a lot of training or support to be used).\u00a0 It also has to be something that has slipped between the cracks in the military’s inventory control because nothing of that value is missing.<\/p>\n

It is a puzzler, all right, but Reacher loves puzzles.\u00a0 He also loves that the liaison with the NSC is an attractive woman who falls for Reacher’s charms and is more than willing to share his bed between forays into the field in search of clues.<\/p>\n

Once the culprit is identified to be the AWOL grunt and it becomes obvious that his theft is the culmination of a plan that formed years earlier, before he even joined the army, the investigation tries to figure out what the plan is by interviewing people from his past.\u00a0 The most salient clue is a cryptic comment he made to a fellow soldier that he joined the army “because of Davy Crockett.”<\/p>\n

Of course the team figures it all out eventually and just in the nick of time, with about 95% of the credit due to Reacher and his insights.\u00a0 They all get a medal.<\/p>\n

Not the most compelling Reacher story I have ever read, but damn good still.<\/p>\n

8 out of 10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Copyright 2016 by Lee Child, published by Delacorte Press. This is the 21st book in the Jack Reacher series.\u00a0 I like all of the Jack Reacher books.\u00a0 He is larger than life, sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, always analytical and never predictable.\u00a0 All of which makes for a good read. In Night School he is in … Continue reading »<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1VniU-1S6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7198"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7200,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7198\/revisions\/7200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}