The Secret
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3.8 • 53 Ratings
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Brought to you by Penguin.
Chicago. 1992. A hospital patient wakes to find two strangers by his bed.
They show him a list of names and ask a simple but impossible question. Minutes later he falls to his death from his twelfth-floor window - a fall which generates some unexpected attention.
That attention comes from the Secretary of Defense, who calls for an inter-agency task force to investigate. Jack Reacher, recently demoted from Major, is assigned as the Army's representative. If he gets a result, great. If not, he's a convenient fall guy.
Reacher may be an exceptional military investigator, but office politics aren't what gets him up in the morning. As he races to identify a cold-blooded killer and uncover a secret that stretches back 23 years, he must navigate around his new partners.
Will Reacher bring the bad guys to justice the official way . . . or his way?
PRAISE FOR THE JACK REACHER SERIES
'There's only one Jack Reacher. Accept no substitutes.' MICK HERRON
'Jack Reacher is today's James Bond, a thriller hero we can't get enough of.' KEN FOLLETT
'Everyone needs to kick some butt sometimes, even if it's just imaginary.' JOJO MOYES
Although the Jack Reacher novels can be read in any order, The Secret is the 28th book in the internationally bestselling series.
©2023 Andrew Child & Lee Child (P)2023 Penguin Audio
Customer Reviews
Jack’s back
The authors are British brothers, both successful in the thriller genre. Andrew took over primary word-smithing duties from older brother Lee several years ago for the fictional colossus that is Jack Reacher. (He’s no colossus when Tom Cruise stars in the movie.)
Like his creator Mr Child senior, our hero is getting a bit long in the tooth for the antics he gets up to. This outing takes readers back to the early 1990s when he was still a military policeman, albeit recently demoted from Major to Captain due his unorthodox methods and disdain for following orders. Our boy and a group of similar expendables from other agencies (FBI, Treasury department etc) are tasked with finding who is bumping off scientists from a US chemical company that was developing antidotes to Russian biological agents in India back in Cold War days. (No, not developing nerve agents for the CIA. None of that.) The killers, a couple of gals who learned their skills in the IDF, make short but elegant work of a series of pensioner scientists and sundry military types supposed to be guarding them. They almost get the better of Jack too. He proves he’s not just a pretty biceps by working out who the real villain is, and taking [insert pronoun of choice] down as well.
As usual for Reacher books, the pace was good, and the plot twists plentiful, if not unduly challenging to untangle. The estimable Jeff Harding was, once more, in fine fettle with the narration.
Ok
Was ok, but too short.
Completely unbelievable and yet predictably boring.
Reacher books have always had a certain implausible repetitive nature to their plots but this one is somehow simultaneously completely unbelievable and predictably boring. Give it a pass.