Book Review: The Secret (Jack Reacher) by Lee Child

Recently I started up a pretty intellectually heavy book entitled Lucifer's Hammer and got about 20 percent of the way into it and started experiencing that phenomenon where you will read 3-4 pages and then realize you are on autopilot and have no idea what you just read. The book was just too intense and intellectual for what I was in the mood for and I decided that I needed something a bit more light hearted and simple for a break I suppose. "Lucifer's Hammer" got put on the back burner perhaps to be returned to at a later date and instead I went for a book in a series of books that I am familiar with but have never read any of out of Jack Reacher series entitled "The Secret."

I think that because of the popular TV show and maybe even the completely ridiculous Tom Cruise movie that most people are at least somewhat familiar with what Jack Reacher is all about but what you might not know is that there are a lot of these books and while I have only read this one - and it is likely to be the only one of them that I will read - they seem to be quite formulaic, but are very easy to consume.

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Just briefly about the Tom Cruise movie and why it was so absurd. Jack Reacher is around 6 foot 5 (perhaps more) in the books and is meant to be an absolute beast of a man. Tom Cruise is less than 5 foot 8 and is well known to have a bit of a complex about how small he is to the point where he will never cast actually big people in his action movies or if he does, they use camera angles that conceal that he is not a big person. The fact that he decided to play this role of someone a foot taller than he is in real life and probably twice as heavy says to me that he was either seeing what he could get away with, or trying to prove that he can play any character and people will still watch it.

Now getting back to the book. The Secret isn't anything particularly groundbreaking but I will say that it is very well-written for someone looking for literature that is easily consumed. The chapters are short, the characters are well-defined, and the action is non-stop. There is very little downtime and things are kept fast-paced all the way through.

There are 28 of these books and from what I have read most or all of them follow a similar path of investigation, butt-kicking, and of course, the eventual victory on the part of Reacher. I didn't need to be familiar with the movie or series to realize that this was going to happen. I think the most interesting aspect of the book was the villains, and this is similar to why 007 movies are always a hit even though we know damn well that James Bond is going to emerge victorious in the end of all of those.

A lot of the allure of a book is lost in these sort of series books in my mind because it is very similar to any action films that are starring The Rock. You know before the beginning credits even roll that whoever he is playing will be victorious, it is just a question of how it is that they get there.

Lee Child does a good job with his storytelling though and although I cannot speak for all 28 of the Reacher books, this one has a two perspective narrative, one from the perspective of Jack Reacher and another from the perspective of who the baddies are. Both are defined very early on and therefore we, the readers, get to have information that the others don't know about and I suppose that is an interesting way of telling a story.

Now I will say this: Some of the information and the very coincidental way in which the good guys end up finding out about it seem pretty unlikely, and I believe that many people will find this irritating like I do in both films and in books. I do not like it when someone just happens to be at the right place at the right time when the world that we (and the characters) live in is an enormous place yet this seems to happen frequently in The Secret.

There is some interesting perspectives about the clandestine nature of the CIA and other federal agencies that could just be conspiracy theory but also does seem to be somewhat reflective on life.

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While I wouldn't exactly call this book something that anyone definitely should read, I will say that the 520 pages were easy to tear through and I was done and dusted with this book in a mere 3 nights. It is a page turner but at times I did find myself simply scanning paragraphs because a lot of the description isn't really necessary and it felt like Child was just trying to get his word count up. That's ok though because it was an easy read.

This certainly isn't anything amazing, but if you are looking for something entertaining that you aren't going to have to think too much about when you are reading it, you can do a lot worse than The Secret. I would give the book an overall rating of C+