Book Review: Die Trying

Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novel, Die Trying, is written in short declarative sentences.  The sentences impart information.  The reader registers the information.  The plot advances.
The story begins with three armed men kidnapping FBI agent Holly Johnson outside a dry cleaning store in Chicago.  Innocent bystander Jack Reacher is captured as well.  Reacher and Holly are transported to a separatist military base in Montana where the commander, Beau Borken, plans to have the community secede from the U.S.  His intention is to use Holly as a leveraging tool against the U.S. government.  
Meanwhile, the FBI tracks Holly to Montana.  Unbeknownst to the FBI, there is a moll in the operation who notifies Borken of everything the FBI is about to do. 
In a race against time, Jack Reacher must use his military training to assist Holly in escaping the compound before Borken and his fanatics exact their true plan. 
From a story standpoint, Die Trying is entertaining.  Child keeps the action foremost, and he nicely builds the tension as the puzzle pieces come into place.  Reacher himself is an interesting character; his skill set is enormous without being superhuman.  He has learned to be observant and to pull together clues about what is going on.  To escape, he does a fair amount of killing, without turning into Rambo.  His moral compass is definitely  not rigid, as he must struggle with choices of whether to kill or not.
Child makes an effort to give Holly depth as well.  She is resourceful, tough, and sharply intelligent, and she is skillful enough to be instrumental in her own breakout.  I suspect the author’s intention is to make Holly fiercely spirited; Child has all the FBI agents who work with Holly apparently respect her for her intellect, but they also never overlook how beautiful she is.  All her character traits – even her physical strength – are seen through the male lens.  Would she be less valuable if she lacked beauty or wasn’t so smart?
As a villain, Beau Borken is intriguingly charismatic, albeit sickly sadistic.  At first, he comes across as highly intelligent.  He has put together a curious plan to initiate his community’s secession from the U.S.  But as Jack Reacher undermines his plans, Borken all but devolves into a spittle-spewing sociopath, and by the end of the novel he apparently lacks the wit to pull off his intended coup.
Back to those declarative sentences:  Jack Reacher has an eye for detail.  He is constantly observing and assessing information so as to make the most informed decisions about escape.  Child uses language that is primarily informative, rather than emotive, which allows the reader to absorb the clues much in the same way as Reacher.  Like a murder mystery, there are hints along the way, so the reader has to pay attention.  Also, the declarative sentences help the reader empathize with Reacher’s perspective. 
One problem with declarative sentences is that not all information is essential to the story:

“Five o’clock in the summer, the afternoon sun streamed in through the walls of windows and gave the people arriving in the room a choice.  If they sat facing the windows, they got the sun in their eyes and squinted through the meeting and ended up with a blinding headache.  And the sun overpowered the air conditioning; so if they sat backs to the window, they got heated up to a point where it got uncomfortable and they started worrying about whether their deodorant was still OK at five o’clock in the afternoon.  A tough choice, but the top option was to avoid the headache and take the risk of heating up.  So the early attendees took the seats on the window side.”

If this situation was from a single character’s perspective, it would tell the reader something about him or her.  But the generalized take on where this cast of extras chooses to sit doesn’t really advance the story.  There are plenty of instances in the novel of people walking across rooms, picking up phones, sitting in chairs – specific action-related details that are really just stage directions.  As a reader, I don’t need to know that someone had to cross a room to pick up a phone; you can just tell me that the person answered it on the first ring.
Other times, Child’s focus on detail is fascinating.  For instance, he describes the process of firing a rifle.  Not simply the action required, but also the physics of how a rifle works: 

“Firing a sniper rifle over a long distance is a confluence of many things.  It starts with chemistry.  It depends on mechanical engineering.  It involves optics and geophysics and meteorology.  Governing everything is human biology.”

Child then proceeds to give the specifics of the physics so that you are experiencing the moment with Reacher’s depth of knowledge. 
Then there are the shoulder shrugs.  Characters are constantly shrugging their shoulders in response to a question, a comment, or an observation.  If someone is unsure what they might discover, they shrug.  If they are asked a question, and the answer is not as hopeful as you might want, they shrug.  At first, it is primarily Jack Reacher who shrugs, but then so do the FBI agents, and so does Holly, and so do all the other characters.  If it had been a sole trait of a particular character, it would not have been as prominent, but once everyone is doing it, it makes the characters all appear to have the same degree of closed-lipped stoicism. 
In summary, lots of shrugging goes on in Die Trying.  I intended to count the number of times someone shrugs, but then, well, … [shrug].