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Nothing to Lose (Jack Reacher #12)

3.87 of 5 stars 3.87 · rating details · 12,829 ratings · 894 reviews

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Lee Child’s The Affair.

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...more

ebook, 304 pages

Published June 3rd 2008 by Delacorte Press (first published January 1st 2007)

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Jul 21, 2008 JoAnn/QuAppelle rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: almost no one

After reading about 8 of Child's Jack Reacher books, I finally found a dud. It started out thrilling, as expected, but quickly became almost boring. I can not believe I am typing those words.

Reacher's repeatedly doing the same thing, over and over (returning to a bad place) was tedious and so unlike our hero's usual behavior. The plot wandered all over the place and the book was too long.

I found it impossible to buy into the far-fetched "conspiracy theory" with its pathetic "villains" and was...more

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Apr 17, 2008 Joe Moley rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm done with Child after this latest installment. The last few Reacher novels have really dragged and I was hoping this one might revive the series. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

Furthermore, the writer decides to jump on a soap box towards the end and throw in random anti-bush/anti-war diatribe. Obviously, this is his right as the creater of the novel but I found it completely ridiculous and hypocritical of his main character. It would be one thing if Child had done this in previous boo...more

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Mar 09, 2009 Ed rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Ex-MP Jack Reacher is the kind of guy you want on your side in any fight. That's a cliche to say, but he's just reliable and steady and tough. This adventure finds him in Colorado, investigating trouble in two small towns, Despair and Hope. Great adventure like Indiana Jones but a much better developed protag.

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Jul 02, 2012 Aaron rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, thriller, mystery

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I'm not sure I can keep going with these, which is unfortunate since I have three left that I've borrowed. This one, my second Lee Child/Jack Reacher book, was marginally better than Bad Luck And Trouble, but suffered from different problems. Nothing To Lose, much like the book in sequence before it, has a fun overall plot idea ruined by a protagonist who is hard to root for, a lot of meandering plot, and a lot of pure guesswork that turns out to be correct. The story, or at least the main threa...more I'm not sure I can keep going with these, which is unfortunate since I have three left that I've borrowed. This one, my second Lee Child/Jack Reacher book, was marginally better than Bad Luck And Trouble, but suffered from different problems. Nothing To Lose, much like the book in sequence before it, has a fun overall plot idea ruined by a protagonist who is hard to root for, a lot of meandering plot, and a lot of pure guesswork that turns out to be correct. The story, or at least the main thread, focuses on a "bad" Colorado town of Despair (right next to the "good" town of Hope - that alone made me roll my eyes) that conspires to run Reacher out of town. In the end, Reacher figures out that a local Revelation enthusiast preacher/businessman is preparing a dirty bomb to incite events corresponding to Revelation prophecy, and the preacher relies on the Despair citizens to ensure no outsiders find out. Enlisting the help of the pretty, young, female Hope police officer, Reacher is able to thwart his plans by detonating the bomb in a relatively safe place, killing the preacher Thurman and his direct lackeys. Child also takes the opportunity to get political by introducing secondary plotlines involving war deserters and the treatment of veterans, which basically just confused the story.

Pros: Again, the very few action scenes are very visual and are described well. The overall plot idea is good, but tainted by several hard-to-swallow events. It finally did grab me about halfway through, and the climax was a decent payoff for such a huge amount of nothing going on. I have read reviews lamenting Reacher's politics regarding vets and deserters as being out of character, but I actually found it to be quite well explained and actually added an interesting feature to an otherwise dull, lumbering hero. I also found the recovery of refined uranium that would prove illegal operations occurring overseas to be one of the more believable concepts in the whole story.

Cons: Here we go again. First off, at least a hundred pages of Reacher walking, hitchhiking, and driving in and around Despair and Hope could have been cut. It wasn't interesting and it slowed the book down considerably; maybe some description of the landscape might have helped, but there was none except for the distance of the mountains on the horizon. The secondary plots were too much of a distraction and confused things rather than added to the mystery of why Despair was set against Reacher. Obviously their purpose was to give Reacher some depth and opinions on war effects, but it felt unnecessary and clearly did not please the Jack Reacher audience. I found several scenes to stretch credibility, such as the entire population of the town standing in the road between Hope and Despair in order to specifically scare and/or drive off Reacher and the cop Vaughn. I found just the general concept of a whole town in on a conspiracy to build a massive uranium dirty bomb without any information leaks to break credibility entirely, no matter how brainwashed they all are. And a metal refinery that deals with secret depleted uranium used by the U.S. against foreign civilians is staffed by Despair civilians and has security one man can break through? And they put the bomb together and arm it on-site?? I don't buy it at all. Thurman was a completely uninteresting bad guy, being dumb enough to not realize the threat Reacher posed at all right up to the very end. He was supposed to be a faithful believer, but even Reacher pointed out the presence of a lightning rod on his house as proof that he held at least a little doubt in God's plan. Yet Thurman dumbly continues to send harmless men against Reacher in ones and twos, which poses practically no challenge for Reacher and zero interest for readers. One of the most irritating pieces of the book is Reacher confronting Thurman and the two of them going on a voluntary plane ride in order for Reacher to discover where Thurman goes. Not only does Thurman not take the opportunity to permanently take out a threat to his operation, he leaves Reacher two states away and flies home; the level of stupid Reacher has to be to fall for that is incredible. He even remarks on his own stupidity and then spends two boring chapters hitchhiking back to Colorado. Even at the end when Reacher finally deduces the presence of a dirty bomb in a locked shipping container, he is still mostly guessing and assuming, much like the last book. He could have been wrong and it would not have been a surprise if he was wrong; not near enough actual evidence for the existence of the bomb was there. But Reacher is correct, he escapes, and allows Vaughn to detonate the bomb from a safe distance. Much like Reacher's savant-like appreciation for numbers in the previous book (completely absent here) is his recurring ruminations on the philosophy of Zeno, again clearly intended to make him seem intelligent but instead seeming to come out of nowhere and be out of character for a bookless wanderer. Reacher's continued insistence on walking and owning nothing is all well and good, but this is the second book where he has basically set up a place to sleep and keep his stuff and obtained a car without paying for it. It kind of broke down his personal philosophy a bit and I found it a little hypocritical. I also found the near complete lack of described thoughts and emotions from Reacher a problem when it came to finding him sympathetic as a smart, capable hero. Probably the most irritating thing happens as the inciting action, where Reacher essentially bullies a restaurant into allowing him to drink a cup of coffee, even though it would likely be well within its rights to not serve him. Any normal person would have just moved on. But not Reacher, who does not take being vaguely disrespected lying down, and he finds no real reason to keep hanging around until maybe a quarter into the book.

I'm moving on, at least for now. Reacher must not be my kind of hero. In which case, it seems like Tom Cruise is a perfect casting choice...(less)

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Jun 19, 2008 S.D. rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery-thriller

Jack Reacher finds himself between Hope and Despair, actually two cities. Despair is a desolate place where everyone wants to see him out of town. Everything is owned by one man which immediately makes Reacher suspicious. He enlists the aid of a cop in Hope and having a knack for finding trouble, Reacher gets plenty of it. I have always liked Reacher but for some reason this year it seems as though publishers told their writers, "give me a plot involving trashing the government, the military, th...more

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Jun 14, 2008 Jon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery-series

Disappointing but effective installment in Child's Jack Reacher series. This but seemed long for a Reacher thriller and might have been strengthed by cutting one of the three main plot strands. I felt that Child made it more confusing than necessary and could have shored up the suspense with tipping his hand a little more. Starts off great, but we've seen some of the same elements in Killing Floor, Die Trying and Echo Burning. But still, nobody does hardcore, bad-ass loner fiction like Child. Th...more

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Feb 07, 2013 Al rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 minut

...more

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.

From Publishers Weekly

At the start of bestseller Child's solid 12th Jack Reacher novel (after Bad Luck and Trouble), the ex-military policeman hitchhikes into Colorado, where he finds himself crossing the metaphorical and physical line that divides the small towns of Hope and Despair. Despair lives up to its name; all Reacher wants is a cup of coffee, but what he gets is attacked by four thugs and thrown in jail on a vagrancy charge. After he's kicked out of town, Reacher reacts in his usual manner—he goes back and whips everybody's butt and busts up the town's police force. In the process, he discovers, with the help of a good-looking lady cop from Hope, that a nearby metal processing plant is part of a plan that involves the war in Iraq and an apocalyptic sect bent on ushering in the end-time. With his powerful sense of justice, dogged determination and the physical and mental skills to overcome what to most would be overwhelming odds, Jack Reacher makes an irresistible modern knight-errant. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Starred Review Jake Reacher only rents rooms one night at a time, confirming his “absolute freedom to move on.” About the only thing sure to convince Reacher to stick around is someone telling him he has to leave. That’s what happens when the former military policeman turned inveterate loner stops for a cup of coffee in an aptly named company town called Despair, Colorado. Strangers aren’t allowed in Despair, he’s told, and two cops arrive to drive him out to the city limits. You can run Reacher out of town, maybe, but you sure as hell can’t keep him out. Forming an unlikely alliance with a female cop in the neighboring town that’s called—you guessed it—Hope, Reacher sneaks back to Despair and finds all manner of strange goings-on: the creepy burg is run by a megalomaniac entrepreneur who is using his metal-salvage business for something definitely snarky. But what? Reacher finds the answers, of course, but to do so, he pretty much has to go up against the whole damn town. What is it that makes these action-fantasies so satisfying? Yes, there is something of the cartoon superhero in Reacher’s steel-trap mind and body, but the action is so grounded in everyday details that instead of laughing it all off as silly, we find ourselves responding on a deeply emotional, archetypal level. We all feel as if the whole town is against us sometimes; Reacher lets us experience what it would be like, just once, to slap every last one of the fools aligned against us upside the head and then, pausing only to pack our toothbrush, hit the highway. --Bill Ott

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May 14, 2013 Eddie Dobiecki rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is the kind of book where you can read 500 pages in a day. And there's nothing wrong with that.

If you don't know the basics of who this "Reacher" character is by now, I'm genuinely surprised, but I'll give a quick rundown:

Ex-MP Reacher lives by wandering the country. No fixed address. Buys a new set of clothes every time he changes, and throws away the old ones, because having clothes means needing to do laundry, with all that entails. He quit smoking because he didn't want to carry aroun...more

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Apr 19, 2013 Anirban rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: amateur-detective, american-mystery, political-spy-thriller, 2013

A thriller is a kind of book which is meant to thrill the reader. So, when Lee Child sits down and writes a book I am rest assured that if not anything else that the book will thrill me. And, it does, not just me, but also the million fans of Child all over the world.

This book thrilled me, but other than that I can’t say that it did much else. Recaher while drifting enters a town called Despair. No sooner had he entered the town than he finds himself being thrown away out of it, slapped with a v...more A thriller is a kind of book which is meant to thrill the reader. So, when Lee Child sits down and writes a book I am rest assured that if not anything else that the book will thrill me. And, it does, not just me, but also the million fans of Child all over the world.

This book thrilled me, but other than that I can’t say that it did much else. Recaher while drifting enters a town called Despair. No sooner had he entered the town than he finds himself being thrown away out of it, slapped with a vagrancy charge. Not before he had managed to break one of the town deputy’s noses. Reacher doesn’t like getting pushed, so he goes back into the town and then, as a result of Lee Child style, all hell breaks loose with Reacher standing in path of the impending doom, with a lady as the co-warrior.

Now here I guess, lays the biggest flaw of the book. The motive wasn’t strong enough for Reacher to do all the things he did after he was thrown out of the town for the first time. Ok, granted that he is a one-man-army, and he doesn’t like to be pushed around but is it a motive strong enough to snoop around in a town where he is not wanted?? No matter what is hidden there, waiting to be busted or discovered.

Other than this single yet strong flaw, everything was totally Lee Child style. Dialogues, and the pace of the book, everything. He really knows how to build suspense, in every book he writes he builds up the tension from page one, making the reader guess and anticipate the impending doom. Sometimes the ending matches the suspense created earlier; sometimes it doesn’t, as was the case with this book. But, good ending or not, the reading experience is always top grade. Breezing through the pages never poses a problem for me. But, the book could have been 100 pages shorter cutting the pages filled with action sequences and boring travelogue.

Summing up, this book is a light read. Nothing much to expect and definitely not one of Child’s better efforts. Recommended only for hardcore Reacher fans, other readers can happily skip this one.(less)

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Mar 24, 2013 William Bentrim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Nothing to Lose by Lee Child

As embarrassing as it is to admit, I am brand new to Jack Reacher. Hard to believe that I enjoy a genre this much and have not read anything by Lee Child. For any others who haven’t read, Reacher is the consummate, self contained, enormously talented loaner whose insatiable curiosity and stubbornness lead him into difficulties only resolved by applied violence. This tale takes place in a remote and lonely section of Colorado and the towns of Hope and Despair.

Jack Rea...more

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Feb 18, 2013 Tom rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: school yard bullies

My first and maybe last Jack Reacher novel. My main problem is that Jack Reacher is basically a school yard bully. I guess I expected threats, intimidation and brute force as his chosen tools; but it would have been nice to see him backed into a corner, instead of "getting your retaliation in first." Maybe I'm just an old western romantic in that sense. Seems like the good guy in the story should show some restraint until there's no other choice.

Beyond that, I'm guessing you only need to read on...more

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Jan 10, 2013 Mungo James rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

apparently when you edit a review everything is deleted first.

As Reacher would say, OK.

And that is the problem, Child writes in short sentences with small words. Frequently just in phrases.

Apparently Child frequently/always puts Reacher into impossible situations that he fights out of. Child includes many details, most of which are wrong.

1) there is no such thing as a 4 cyl el Camino
2) it isn't a truck & you can't take it offroad anymore than
the Chevelle it is based on
3) quit calling an e...more

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Nov 29, 2012 Cathy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: thriller, iraq-war

I'm on a Lee Child kick and listened to this well narrated, by Dick Hill, book. Unfortunately it wasn't as good as my previous run in with Jack Reacher. Like someone else said, Jack Reacher is the guy you'd want to have on your side if you ran into danger. He's gruff, a math whiz, compulsive and a bit out of control when it comes to beating the **** out of his adversaries.

Here Reacher is on his way from the East Coast to San Diego, hitchhiking his way. He winds up in Despair, Co. which is 12 mil...more

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Nov 17, 2012 Shonna Froebel rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Jack Reacher is back and just as good as ever. This book has it all: suspense, bad guys, mystery, a woman, and Reacher.
Jack is making his way across the country east to west and his last ride brought him to Hope, Colorado. He notices that the next town over is named Despair, and is intrigued and decides to head that way. When he tries to stop in Despair for a bite to eat, not only won't they serve him, but they arrest him on vagrancy charges and drop him out on the town line, to the east, back t...more

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Nov 01, 2012 Rupali Rotti rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book maybe my last in the Lee Child series, but my decision isn't solely based on this book alone. The main reasons are that the gory scenes are too gory for my taste, and there is too much of detail in every book which makes me skip many sentences at a time.
This book didn't appeal to me because of the following reasons:
[1] I don't see a 'drive' or reason for Reacher to go back to a town time and again where he isn't welcome.
[2] Reacher pokes his nose in all the private places, and yet, the...more

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Oct 29, 2012 Kathy Davie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: horror, suspense

Twelfth in the Jack Reacher suspense series about an ex-M.P. roaming the world on his own terms and protecting the innocent.

It's been ten years since he left the army.

My Take
I think this was one of the scarier Reacher novels. To think that a town would exist that was so far out of the norm. And how easy it was for its "rulers" to govern! Part of that "easiness" depended upon how the majority of us were brought up: Keep out of your neighbors' business and follow the rules.

The people in Hope know...more

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Sep 01, 2012 Lizzie Hayes rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

‘Nothing To Lose’ by Lee Child

Jack Reacher, a man with no job, no ties, and no permanent address - his only luggage a folding toothbrush hitches his way into Colorado where he encounters the town of Hope, the following day he enters the next town, Despair, just twelve miles further on. He wants a cup of coffee before he again hits the open road, but the diner in Despair won’t serve him, they tell him in no uncertain terms that he is not welcome in Despair, and he must move on. Reacher doesn’t ta...more

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Jun 09, 2012 Renee rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery-hard-boiled

It's been a long, long time since I read a book by Lee Child; nonetheless, it felt like I'd last read about Jack Reacher just yesterday. I was immediately pulled in to the plot, wondering what was really going on in the town Reacher wandered into. Child revealed information slowly, through Reacher, giving just enough information as the book went along to keep me engrossed and reading eagerly. A few pieces seemed a bit contrived, but Child's pacing is so absolutely magnificent that I didn't reall...more

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Apr 16, 2012 Spencer Bingham rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I thought this book was pretty dang good. The characters in "Nothing to Lose" were very minimal but enough to make the story interesting and exciting. The main character Jack Reacher was, in my opinion, the best character of the entire book. Jack Reacher is a man that travels the country with nothing more than the clothes on his back. It is amazing how a man can even live in dusty and hot conditions for even a day let alone living in those conditions for months on end. I also really liked the na...more I thought this book was pretty dang good. The characters in "Nothing to Lose" were very minimal but enough to make the story interesting and exciting. The main character Jack Reacher was, in my opinion, the best character of the entire book. Jack Reacher is a man that travels the country with nothing more than the clothes on his back. It is amazing how a man can even live in dusty and hot conditions for even a day let alone living in those conditions for months on end. I also really liked the names of the two towns in the book, Hope and Despair. I also love how these two towns are situated, "Two towns in the middle of nowhere Colorado: Hope and Despair. Between them, nothing but twelve miles of empty road." Jack Reacher is one of those awkward humorous kinds of characters. In the book he travels from Hope to Despair traveling the whole twelve miles just to get a cup of coffee. Reacher is a very tough man as well; he could take down four hostile people with ease. The main question of this book also amuses me, "Who has the edge- a man with everything to gain, or a man with nothing to lose?" This question had me thinking for hours because they are practically the same person, except for if the person wants to gain anything or not. The woman Hope police officer is also a very interesting person. She seems like a normal woman but what normal police officer would want to become friends with a painless maniac like Jack Reacher? I thought it was funny how Jack Reacher describes Vaughn the woman Hope police officer, "Probably less than five feet six, probably less than one hundred and twenty pounds, probably less than thirty-five years old." This is funny because Jack Reacher is a giant compared to her tiny little body. The names of the two towns in the book are exactly what they demonstrate in their citizens personalities. The citizens of Hope, like Vaughn are very nice and forgiving. But the people of despair are rude and not friendly in any way, shape or form. For example, Vaughn is a very friendly nice woman, whereas the people that beat up Jack were disrespectful. The people that beat up Jack were from Despair and Vaughn was from Hope.(less)

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Mar 01, 2012 Larry rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So this starts out as the vintage Lee Child/Jack Reacher thrill fest, with the stoic loaner Reacher alone on a desolate highway separating the fictitious and allegorically named Colorado towns of Hope and Despair. Borrowing heavily from Stallone's "First Blood" - and even a bit from Stephen King's eerie "Desperation" - Reacher wants nothing more than a cup of coffee while passing through Despair. Instead, he finds himself first ignored and then in jail for vagrancy. With a provocative and myster...more

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Feb 22, 2012 Anne (Booklady) Molinarolo rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: only hard core Lee Child fans

Shelves: anne-booklady-105-books-in-2012, god-awful, suspense-intrigue, thriller-suspense, winter-2011-12, coffee-n-books-105-in-2012

I can always depend on Lee Child to keep me up all night to finish Jack Reacher’s latest “mission” to help in a desperate situation. But, not this time! After a thrilling, mysterious prologue, Child has Reacher in Colorado where he finds that there is little distance between the fictional towns of Hope and Despair – both in the physicality and allegorical senses. All Reacher wanted was a cup of coffee. He is ignored, beaten up, thrown in jail, and driven back toward Hope after being convicted of...more

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Jan 22, 2012 Jane Stewart rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery-suspense

The least fun Reacher book. Read the others first. Only die hard fans will want to do this one.

STORY BRIEF:
Reacher is hitchhiking west to California. He happens to be let off in Despair, a small town in Colorado. He stops in the town’s only diner for coffee. The waitress and owner refuse to serve him. The local police arrive and put Reacher in jail. Later he sees the judge who orders him to leave town. The police drive him five miles to the town limit. The nearest town is Hope, another ten miles...more

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Jan 10, 2012 Abhishek rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Books in the Lee Child's Reacher series end up competing with themselves. Jack Reacher, as a character, has been created in such a wonderful manner, oozing such charm, with and a kind of arrogance coupled with a no-nonsense attitude to bring down the bad guys, that it is difficult to not want to be on those adventurous journeys he so regularly takes. The only problem lies that once you complete one journey, you want the other one to be better and the next one to be even more better and so on......more

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Sep 11, 2011 Cameling rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: thriller

Ex-military MP, Jack Reacher decides to live his life encumbered by belongings. He doesn't want to live in one place, doesn't want to own anything but the clothes on his back and travels whereever he pleases, stays a long as he wants and moves on. Or so he thought when he decided one day to walk across the country from Maine to California. With just his passport, his ATM card and some cash in his pocket, he passes through the town of Hope and crosses into the town of Despair. The name of the tow...more

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Sep 07, 2011 Ian Mapp rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Another holiday cliche - reading a Lee Child book by the pool.

Maybe in readiness for Tom Cruise playing him in a future film franchise, he has lost a couple of inches. I could have sworn he was 6ft 7 to start with.

Where Reacher Roams, there is rarely nothing but trouble. He walks from Hope into a town called despair and is instantly ejected, like Rambo, for vacrancy by the local police. He kicks there arses and ends back up in hope, where he teams up with the Female Law enforcer to discover what...more

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May 08, 2011 Eric Kibler rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In the last Reacher book, "Bad Luck and Trouble", Reacher meets up with the remnants of his old unit. All of them had moved on into careers. Reacher is essentially a glorified hobo who move on from one adventure to the next, without forming any permanent attachments. One of his old comrades asks him what he's running from. As is his wont, "Reacher said nothing".

Now comes "Nothing to Lose". I can only conclude that either Lee Child had an off year and couldn't write a Reacher consistent with his...more In the last Reacher book, "Bad Luck and Trouble", Reacher meets up with the remnants of his old unit. All of them had moved on into careers. Reacher is essentially a glorified hobo who move on from one adventure to the next, without forming any permanent attachments. One of his old comrades asks him what he's running from. As is his wont, "Reacher said nothing".

Now comes "Nothing to Lose". I can only conclude that either Lee Child had an off year and couldn't write a Reacher consistent with his previous appearances, OR Reacher is bottoming out and is in need of an intervention. The Jack Reacher in the previous novels is a taciturn hero. The one in "Nothing to Lose" is belligerent and reckless, and has probably committed some form of manslaughter against innocent people.

Does he uncover a criminal conspiracy? Yes? Does he kick ass and foil it? Yes. But what sets him off on his destructive course is his own ego. He enters Despair, Colorado, a town that is less than welcoming to outsiders, and gets the bum's rush. Reacher doesn't take this disrespect lightly, and resolves to go back to Despair. He convinces himself that something is going on there that is not on the up-and-up.

I don't want to spoil the plot, so I won't go into the things he does that are so out of line. Just bear in mind that I'm starting for fear for his sanity.

Others have criticized this book on the ground that Reacher has all of a sudden become political. I don't think this is true. Ever since the early days he's been distrustful of the government and military brass while maintaining his sympathies to the common grunt. His experiences in "The Enemy" were pretty disillusioning, and I can see the common thread.

Another observation: in my review of "Bad Luck and Trouble", I remarked on how Reacher is always "butting" stacks of paper together. Well, paper-butting fans, I'm sorry to tell you that Reacher doesn't butt any paper in this outing. No. He's started butting rocks together. Maybe in the next book he'll butt scissors together for the trifecta. (less)

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Apr 17, 2011 Sean Cronin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I like Lee Child and his protagonist, Reacher. The guy can create a mystery, make it tense and maintain it about as well as anyone in the business.
Nothing to lose is pure Reacher. Tough guy. Very tough. If you haven't read a Reacher novel, well, get ready for hero who's physical. Like kick-butt, no quarter, muscle and bone power. He's big. Former Military Police. A guy with all the tools to cause serious chaos. He does. But he's not one dimensional. From this book, "Back when he smoked he might...more

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Feb 26, 2011 Tony rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Lee Child- Nothing to Lose (Dell Books 2009) 4.5 Stars

When Jack Reacher walks into the small company town of Despair he has no idea what he is getting himself into. Stopping at a local diner he asks for a cup of coffee, but in this town that is asking for trouble. They don’t like strangers and they don’t like him. After he gets told to leave town his ire and curiosity is aroused. Now he plans to make it his personal mission to find out just what they are hiding in the town of Despair, no matter...more

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Feb 11, 2011 Paul Pessolano rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Jack Reacher is back and on the loose. Jack is in the city of Hope, Colorado and is heading for the next city, Despair, Colorado. No sooner does he get into town, he is confronted by the Police and is considered a vagrant. Jack Reacher fans will probably say thats no big deal because essentially thats what Jack is. However, as we all know, Jack does not take well to this and really becomes upset when he is asked to leave town. Jack tells them he is not going and he is escorted out of town and dr...more

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Dec 16, 2010 Dlora rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adventure-action

I keep thinking I know Reacher's character but each book I have read adds more. In this book, Reacher is traveling diagonally across the U.S. from Maine to San Diego on a whim. He ends up in a town called Despair in Colorado from which is he evicted on vagrancy charges. And that sets off all his stubbornness. He says he hates "turning back. He likes to press on, dead ahead, whatever. Everyone's life needed an organizing principle, and relentless forward motion was Reacher's." That intrigued me....more

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About Lee Child

Lee Child was born in 1954 in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended. He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theater he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a presentation...more

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Quotes from Nothing to Lose

“No, I'm a man with a rule. People leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don't, I don't.” — 34 people liked it

“A person less fortunate than yourself deserves the best you can give. Because of duty, and honor, and service. You understand those words? You should do your job right, and you should do it well, simply because you can, without looking for notice or reward.” — 29 people liked it

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Nothing to Lose (Jack Reacher #12)

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