#BookReview :: Nothing to Lose (Jack Reacher #12) by Lee Child

Two lonely towns in Colorado: Hope and Despair. Between them, twelve miles of empty road. Jack Reacher never turns back. It's not in his nature. All he wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets is big trouble. So in Lee Child’s electrifying new novel, Reacher—a man with no fear, no illusions, and nothing to lose—goes to war against a town that not only wants him gone, it wants him dead.

It wasn’t the welcome Reacher expected. He was just passing through, minding his own business. But within minutes of his arrival a deputy is in the hospital and Reacher is back in Hope, setting up a base of operations against Despair, where a huge, seething walled-off industrial site does something nobody is supposed to see . . . where a small plane takes off every night and returns seven hours later . . . where a garrison of well-trained and well-armed military cops—the kind of soldiers Reacher once commanded—waits and watches . . . where above all two young men have disappeared and two frightened young women wait and hope for their return.

Joining forces with a beautiful cop who runs Hope with a cool hand, Reacher goes up against Despair—against the deputies who try to break him and the rich man who tries to scare him—and starts to crack open the secrets, starts to expose the terrifying connection to a distant war that’s killing Americans by the thousand.

Now, between a town and the man who owns it, between Reacher and his conscience, something has to give. And Reacher never gives an inch.

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There are two neighbouring towns by the name of Hope and Despair with nothing but miles of empty roadways between them. Intrigued by their names, Jack Reacher decides to check out the towns for himself and find ay reasons for the curious naming behind them. But this is Reacher we are talking about and not everything is about to be smooth and easy. While he was at Despair and sipping on the much-needed cup of coffee, he is asked to leave the town and the police officer cites ‘vagrancy’ as the cause. Of course, Reacher hasn’t done anything other than heading straight for his usual dose of black coffee. In any case, he ends up in Hope, only to find out that a body has been found on the roads between Hope and Despair. Reacher spurns into action doing what he is good at.

Though the theme of Jack Reacher ‘accidentally’ stumbling across big plots in small towns is starting to become old, I cannot deny that I look forward to it. These are the cases where one gets to see how efficient Reacher can really be. I mean walking into something you know you are walking into and handling it is one thing, but walking in without any clue about it and handling the situation is another thing on the whole. Seeing the wheels turn in Reachers mind, with some action on the side, is a pleasure! And Jack Reacher doesn’t disappoint this time either. He is in full steam when he smells the fish. The thing I love about Reacher books is that sometimes there’s a little something sprinkled in the story that hints towards his illustrious yet elusive career in the military that makes you even more curious. We get some of that in this book.

If you have read Jack Reacher before, then this book offers everything you expect from a Reacher novel. If you haven’t read a Reacher novel before, well then go start from the beginning!