Review: Don't Know Jack by Diane Capri
Don’t Know Jack by Diane Capri
This book is founded on a great idea. Two FBI agents are given a secret mission to find Jack Reacher and the information they’re given to start their search with is the location of his first novel, The Killing Floor, which happened fifteen years earlier than the novel Don’t Know Jack. If you like Lee Child’s famous series, this would appear to be a wonderful chance to relive that first novel through the eyes of law enforcement. Unfortunately, nothing about the novel really works. These two FBI agents find dead bodies and leave them without reporting them. They shoot at people—and hit them—without reporting it. They basically violate the law and FBI regulations with incredible frequency and never suffer any consequences or even seem to worry that they are committing crimes. Oh, but they’re sure that Jack Reacher is a no-good violent individual whom they assume is abusing people right and left—maybe they should look in the mirror. I don’t understand why Lee Child approved this book, much less a whole series.
newest »
Sometimes reinventing characters works to rejuvenate a series, and sometimes it doesn't. This one doesn't sound like it worked. I once read a John Carter of Mars pastiche where he and Dejah Thoris were having marital problems; they had a second son born (that is, hatched) crippled up pretty bad from some incurable wasting disease, who was apparently a great disappointment to JC. The story was pretty depressing out of the gate. I didn't much care for JC and Dejah acting aloof toward one another.
Chris wrote: "Sometimes reinventing characters works to rejuvenate a series, and sometimes it doesn't. This one doesn't sound like it worked. I once read a John Carter of Mars pastiche where he and Dejah Thoris ..."The Jack Reacher series really is great! And there's another one that I'm two books in on called The Reacher Experiment by Jude Hardin (the protagonist is a clone of Reacher in the future from an off the books army project that they are now trying to clean up by killing him) that works really well. But I just don't know what they were thinking with Don't Know Jack.
Gilbert wrote: "Chris wrote: "Sometimes reinventing characters works to rejuvenate a series, and sometimes it doesn't. This one doesn't sound like it worked. I once read a John Carter of Mars pastiche where he and..."A previous supervisor of mine was a huge Reacher fan. He drove like 1h 15min to work and devoured audiobooks.
