One of the books about Jack Reacher; not my kind of thing, I must say, not bad but sort of boring: too much following his random thoughts and too much description of New York streets, and much less action than I thought. The story is written in the first person, from Jack's point of view. It is interesting, because you learn a piece of it after another along with him, until the whole thing is (more or less) clear. It starts with Reacher on a train, noticing a woman. She has all the 'twelve signs' of a female suicide bomber, and Reacher approaches her, but she has no bomb, only a gun that she uses to kill herself in front of him. He is obviously approached by NYPD, but also by some federals who refuse to identify themselves and by some other men working for a mysterious figure he doesn't yet know. They are all interested in Susan Mark, the dead woman, and in what she might have told or given him before her death. So many questions and mysteries keep him interested and he keeps investigating. The men were sent by Lila Hoth. She pretends to be a victim, with her mother Svetlana, but actually she's a psycopath and a terrorist, they both are. They had kidnapped Susan's son, and had her steal a picture from the Government. A national security secret. I can't talk about this book without revealing everything at once. So:
an ex military officer now running for senator is involved. It's a picture of him with Bin Laden during a secret mission, in Reagan's time. Reacher thinks the woman want the picture because it might be a problem to them more than it might damage Sansom's career or the US Government, but we're never told what details were in that picture, so neither Reacher or us will ever know this.
Anyway, Susan was bringing them the picture, but she got stuck in traffic for hours and couldn't meet the deadline, so the Hoth women (probably, this is all Reacher's reconstruction of what happened) sent her proof that her son Peter had been killed (and in a horrible way). Desperate but unable to do anything, still stuck on the road, she slowly thought of vengeance. She had a gun, she prepared herself for a sort of suicide mission, because she had no chance of coming out of there alive. The Hoth women had twenty men with them: 22 against 1. But maybe she could have been able to kill Lila if Reacher had not approached her that night.
Reacher has a bit of help from a cop, Theresa Lee (who of course will sleep with him, as usual there can be no story with a man and a woman without sex, how boring) and also from Sansom and his loyal man and ex military Springfield. Reacher is determined to take them out personally and by himself, so he goes alone. After all the men are neutralized or killed, Reacher has the last fight with the two women assassins. They all have knives. Reacher kills old Svetlana first, then Lila gives him a bad wound, cutting him in the stomach, then he kills her. Of course.
He has other books to fill, he can't die like this, right?
The end. Reacher is helped by Springfield and Lee and brought to a hospital. He gives Sansom indication of where he would find the picture-file, then he thinks back and regrets his approaching Susan. She would have died anyway, but maybe if she had killed Lila she would have died happy (well, less desperate because glad of having avenged Peter's murder). It ends with Lee telling him that "apparently" the file was destroyed; of course that's politics, no chance he could really see it; he spends some time thinking about it, about the reason the Hoths wanted it so much, but after a month, bored and tired of making conjectures he forgets the whole thing and moves on.
Personally I found it rather boring, this book had so many pages not because there were lots of things to say but because he showed us every corner of every street and even informed us on the color of his shirts anytime he buys a new one. Still, it wasn't bad, just boring.
I liked Springfield, though.
ITA i dodici segni
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