Book info

• Title Without Fail
• Author Lee Child
• Year 2002
• Genre Thriller

Jack Reacher walks alone. No job, no ID, no last known address. But he never turns down a plea for help. Now a woman tracks him down. A woman serving at the very heart of US power. A woman who needs Reacher's assistance in her new job. Her job? Protecting the Vice-President of the United States. Her problem? Someone wants the VP dead.

Thoughts

Jack Reacher is ex-military and is the go-to guy when the Secret Service need help protecting the Vice-President elect. He’s brought in to analyse the holes in their security and finds plenty. Reacher is a mysterious character, a complex guy living out of a suitcase but with plenty of metaphorical baggage.

His relationship with Froelich is odd to me. Six years on, she still has his suits in her wardrobe and he thinks this is completely normal. He doesn’t let anyone get close to him though, and through the course of the book it becomes more and more obvious why.

I got a tiny bit annoyed at the lack of commas and/or new sentences in the book. Part of a typical sentence:

…rinsed all over and got out and dripped on the floor and searched for a towel.

I find that quite hard to read, and it happened a lot. The grammar, not necessarily the dripping.

I found the story pretty slow to begin with, not much seemed to happen until at least halfway through, but when it did start happening it was clear and exciting. It was well thought out and kept me gripped, I just felt it could have done with another layer of polish.

Revisited - Jan 2025

I’m making my way through the Reacher series, it’s still early days, but for some reason I’ve already read this one, a long time ago. I don’t remember too much about it from the first read through, except clearly I enjoyed it. This time round, it meant a lot more as I’ve ploughed through the first few books. So everything around his brother makes more sense, and the sadness of his ex-girlfriend. There were interesting twists and turns along the way, but I mostly enjoyed the introduction of Neagly who is a fascinating and engaging character - mostly because of her frosty professionalism.

Rating: 3 / 5