Book Review: The Secret

I find it rather amusing that I finished Lee Child and Andrew Child’s 28th Jack Reacher novel released this month, The Secret when I did. After all, the latest book I read was, Can You Keep a Secret? (ha-ha), and two books prior to that one was Lessons in Chemistry, about a female chemist trying to navigate the sexist scientific world of the 1950s and 1960s. In The Secret, a female chemist is also trying to navigate the sexist scientific world of the 1960s, and even of the 1990s, including in the business world, but she has far more nefarious means to her ends than Elizabeth Zott did.

Let’s face it. If we keep following a linear progression with Jack Reacher stories, we’re talking about a character who is getting older. Granted, he’s one of those older military men, his height and weight notwithstanding, I still wouldn’t want to mess with in his old age. But that’s why I love that Lee Child and Andrew Child brought Reacher back to his Military Police days in the 1990s with The Secret. Some of my favorite books in the Reacher catalog are throwbacks to that time period, and theoretically, you could do stories like that for the next 100 years without aging Reacher out of ass-kicking.

Reacher is put on a task force along with an FBI agent, a CIA agent, and Treasury Department official to figure who is killing a scientists-who-are-actually-spies connected to a biological weapons program carried out by the U.S. government ostensibly to defend against the Soviet Union in 1969. The Secretary of Defense is leading the charge on finding out who is behind the slayings, and his wife is the aforementioned chemist who now is a Fortune 500 CEO of her own chemical company. Unbeknownst to the task force early on, not only is the killer not a man, but a woman, but it’s two women — sisters, in fact — hell-bent on some sort of revenge against the scientists.

As the plot unfurls, we learn that the U.S. government was actually on the offensive creating biological weapons of their own and a “spill” occurred, causing 1,007 deaths in India, where the operation was conducted. The sisters’ dad was blamed for the spill and later apparently hanged himself in shame. Therein lies their motivation for revenge, truth, and of course, money to top it off. Now, I had a suspicion early-on that it wasn’t the Secretary of Defense who was behind the ruthless killings and cover-up of what occurred in 1969; I suspected his wife, the chemist, Susan Kasluga. The way she was depicted, she seemed cutthroat. Little did I know just how cutthroat because she ends up killing her own husband (and trying to frame the sisters) to cover-up the events of ’69.

What’s notable about the book, other than taking us back to the early 1990s, is how short it is, clocking in at 292 pages. That is the shortest Jack Reacher novel to date. Early on in the series, quite a few were hitting upwards of 400, and even 500 pages. If Wikipedia and Amazon are correct, the shortest novel of the series prior to this one was 2012’s A Wanted Man at 304 pages. Since Andrew Child joined the team, the books have tended to hit that 350-ish mark, give or take. I tend to be one of those readers who likes a lot to chew on, if the story is good, of course. With a favorite character like Reacher, I especially prefer more to play with! This late into a series’ run, especially with another author taking over, I might suspect they are running out of material, hence the shorter length. However, while notable and something my rabbit-hole brain noticed, I don’t think it’s actually a mark against The Secret. It’s a tight story, with an intriguing plot, a different kind (and number) of villains, and again, has the intrigue of being set in an earlier part of Reacher’s life when he still had a career in the military and wasn’t the minimalist drifter we know him as in the present day.

On the other hand, I do think this was the first book in the Andrew Child run thus far to not have any notable or fun fight scenes. Reacher takes down some Russian goons to potentially learn more about the events of ’69, but that’s about it. He didn’t even get a chance to have a formidable fight with the two sisters, who turned out to be trained by the Israel Defense Forces. That might have posed a challenge to him! That said, I did mention in my review of the prior Reacher novel that Reacher never gets hit anymore. One of the sisters does hit him in the legs with a baton, so there’s that, albeit, it didn’t change the outcome for her, obviously.

If you like Reacher, you’ll have fun going back in time with him, and it’s an especially cozy, easy day-ish read on a rainy day like I had today.