Blue Moon by Lee Child

Published by Random House/Delacorte Press on October 29, 2019

Readers who crave gratuitous violence can count on Reacher novels to satisfy their addiction. Readers who enjoy a good thriller and don’t mind gratuitous violence can count on Reacher novels to push the right buttons. Lee Child’s punchy sentences and short chapters assure that the novel will move quickly, and he usually comes up with a plot that isn’t stale. Readers who want to root for decent characters will always find someone to like, while readers who appreciate the complexity of human nature will admire the darkness with which otherwise likeable characters are infused. Reacher novels are serious but characters occasionally say something amusing to relieve tension. There’s a little something for everyone in a Reacher novel.

Blue Moon follows that formula. The plot carries the ever-wandering Reacher into a small city that is divided down the middle. Both sides are controlled by criminal organizations. Albanians are in charge of crime on the east side while Ukrainians provide the crime on the west side. The operate protection rackets, loan sharking, prostitution, and other enterprises that, in the good old days, were Mafia-run businesses.

A kindly old gent named Aaron Shevick has borrowed from a loan shark to pay for an expensive treatment that might save his daughter’s life. He is on his way to repay the loan when a mugger interrupts him. Reacher knew this would happen we he saw the envelope full of cash in Shevick’s pocket, so he follows Shevick and thwarts the crime. Then he acts as a bodyguard and even stands in for the old guy to make the payment, something that is made possible because the regular Albanian hood has been replaced by a Ukrainian hood who doesn’t know Shevick. That happened because of a power grab that turns into a comedy of errors as each side misunderstands the forces driving their conflict. A confusion of identities follows, as both the Ukrainian and Albanian organizations operate under the mistaken belief that Reacher is Shevick. The Ukrainians even come to believe that Reacher is a representative of organized crime in Russia who has been sent to take over the entire city on behalf of Russian interests.

All of that, of course, is just an excuse for Reacher to bust heads and to shoot people for a worthy cause. In this case, the cause is to protect the Shevick family, although he also hopes he can help by locating Maxim Trulenko, who embezzled funds his company should have used to pay health insurance premiums for his employees, including Shevick. This leads to an interesting and possibly accurate discussion of how administrators of a government fund that is supposed to address problems like this one are motivated to save money by waiting for patients to die so they don’t need to pay their healthcare expenses.

That, however, is the only serious point in a novel that is dominated by Reacher proving again that he is the toughest guy on the planet. I lost track of the body count as Reacher gunned down every Ukranian and Albanian criminal in the city. This is tolerable because, unlike most tough guy protagonists in thriller world, Reacher isn’t obnoxious about his toughness. It’s just who he is. Being tough is something he does. No big deal. I appreciate that. And I appreciate the action, despite its implausibility. Also implausible is Reacher’s ability to guess at the existence and location of a secret guarded passage into an otherwise impregnable building, but hey, it’s Reacher. Of course he can do implausible things.

Between the action scenes, Reacher engages in his usual musings. Other characters join him in speculating about what might happen next and how to plan for it. All of that held my interest, as Child always does. Only at the very end does the story’s implausibility become hard to swallow. Still, happy endings are nearly always implausible. Readers want them anyway.

Reacher’s good-and-evil perspective appeals to readers who believe that answers to moral questions are never ambiguous, but to his credit, Child doesn’t pander to mean-spirited readers who view the world as a simplistic conflict of us against them. Central characters are primarily decent or villainous, but Child shades them with a touch of gray. Most of Reacher’s killings in Blue Moon are acts of self-defense, although some are outright murders of unarmed bad guys, at least one of whom committed no obvious crime that warranted the death penalty. If that sort of thing troubles you, there is hope for humanity. If it troubles you even to imagine such things, Blue Moon isn’t the book for you. Child doesn’t glorify the killings, so I can accept them for the sake of the story, even if I would want to see Reacher behind bars in the real world. Fortunately, the real world is pretty far removed from a Reacher novel, which makes it easier to recommend Blue Moon as one of Child’s typically well-executed tough guy fantasies.

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