Book review: The Enemy, by Lee Child (Jack Reacher Series #8)

Posted on April 1, 2023 by Richard H. McBee Jr.

The Enemy by Lee Child

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lee Child as always does a great job of opening and closing a book. This tale fills us in on a lot of Jack Reacher’s life prior to departing the military for his walk-about stories. The stage for the story is set with a seemingly routine death investigation that then leads into a murder that is in no way on the ordinary scale. Reacher gets a strange transfer from a seemingly important foreign site job to an out of the way station for no apparent reason and soon finds out that a whole lot of his colleagues have also been transferred. Something is brewing in the higher echelons of the military and the MP commanding officers are being spread out in strange posts. Reacher disobeys a direct order from his commanding officer in order to follow up on leads that will eventually reveal how his commander is mixed up in a very complex scheme of murder and control of the new military order that is coming down the pipeline in the next few years. I recomment the book for readers who want to know a bit more about how Jack Reacher thinks and the quirks of his personality that bring him into conflict with higher authroities and ultimately lead to his leaving avtive duty. The book is a bit wordy in the middle with side stories that are unrealated to the overall central story of the book and don’t require the number of pages devoted to them to get across the message. I felt the book jumped hither and yon a bit too much. There was a bit too much of forging commanding officers signatures and jumping of the plane at a momnent’s notice, but it’s a good read and certainly a great escape novel for travelers or those on vacation in between more adventurous things like scuba diving. Enjoy once again a book written by a master of the genre.

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