Lee Child: Echo Burning

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Child's main character Reacher is something like a cross between an Arnold Schwarzenegger and a Timothy McVeigh. He could have gone either way. He is the lone vigilante: a man with scant history, more than a few grudges and a background in licensed killing. In other words, an all-American hero.

"Have you killed people, Reacher? In the Army?" asks the woman who picks him up from the side of the road in a Texas summer in a place called Echo.

"Some."

"That's what the Army is all about, fundamentally, isn't it?" she said.

"I guess so," he said. "Fundamentally."

Fundamentally Reacher is a type. He's the man cut adrift from the organised but "kind of rough and uncivilised" world of the forces into that other refuge of the male American imagination, the Wild West.

A frontier town of the mind where a man can travel with just a toothbrush and enough cash in his back pocket to pay the night rate in cheap motels. In Echo Burning he meets a woman married to a redneck who likes to hit her. She's been cruising, looking for a man like Reacher - to kill the husband.

Politics, conspiracy theories and a kid are involved. No surprises here, and the tension between good and bad is about as obvious as a before and after "tone the abs" ad, but Child can churn out a Reacher plot neatly enough that you can predict, at the end of the book, he'll be back.

Bantam Press

$34.95