The Affair: A Reacher Novel By Lee Child Random House Large Print, 2011 ISBN: 978-0739378489 Genre: Mystery

Reviewed by Israel Drazin - November 14, 2011

The millions of Reacher fans know that he had been an Army MP Major who left the army after some kind of disagreement or physical assault, after fifteen years of service, after receiving a silver star, and began wondering from town to town, unable to settle down, where he helps people who need help. They know that he is exceptionally tall, has a keen understanding of practical matters, has a clock in his head that tells him time to the minute and wakes him at the exact moment he wants to be wakened. They know that frequently, driven by what he considers to be right, Reacher acts as investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, even though the law explicitly forbids this behavior. They know that he can fight. Those fans who read the short story about Reacher at age thirteen know that he could fight even at that age and even against large odds. He can anticipate what will happen next, where blows will fall, and knows how, as a brawler, he can land blows that will fell his opponents, like a woodcutter landing his final chop on a tree. They know all this and much more about this hero. But what they don’t know, and what they have wanted to know for so long, is why he left the army. Now, Lee Child reveals the past. It is 1997 in this novel, the year that the affair occurred that caused Reacher to leave.

Reacher was, as we know, a well decorated and respected MP Major at that time. But he was also a man who did not suffer fools gladly; he was a competent man with his own ideas, which he was not afraid to state. Thus he was well like by many, but not all. This was the year that the army was cutting back its forces. Would Reacher be one of those who were cut?

He was given an assignment. A woman had been killed in a small Mississippi town adjacent to a Ranger camp. The town inhabitants and its ex-marine beautiful MP Sheriff were convinced that the murderer was a Ranger. Reacher was ordered to go to the town under cover, as a civilian, control the sheriff, and find the murderer among the civilians. Another MP Major was sent to the Ranger camp itself to look into the situation and control it. This second major was very competent, as competent as Reacher. Was the army setting him up? If anything went wrong would he be blamed? Was this a cover up? Could the other major be trusted? What was this second major really doing in the camp?

Reacher discovers that while the murdered woman was white, there were two other murders in the town during the year, both black, all three very beautiful. He is soon drawn to the beautiful sheriff, but the army assures him with proof that she is not what she appears to be. Other murders soon occur.

Readers will enjoy reading how Reacher is able to see things that others miss and how he reacts to them with his customary moral force. They will also finally find out why this hero left the military, the work his father and brother did, and begin to wander and help others.

• 61 Hours: A Reacher Novel, by Lee Child.
  A tour bus crashes in a savage snowstorm and lands Jack Reacher in the middle of a deadly confrontation between one brave woman and the assassin being paid to kill her.
  
  
• The Enemy, by Lee Child.
  In the eighth Jack Reacher novel, Child goes back to 1990 when Reacher was an MP investigating the death of a general in a lowlife motel outside Fort Bird, North Carolina.