I’m subbing for my friend, the speech and theatre teacher for the next few days, which means I have plenty of time to read and clack away on my computer. After I finish this newsletter, I’m going to continue trying to trudge through the tall grass of How Fiction Works by James Wood. Nothing like a scholarly examination of the inner workings of fiction to make one feel like a complete moron. While I’m busy trying to follow Mr. Wood’s explanation of free indirect style, please enjoy my thoughts on a much less intellectually daunting but much more exciting book I recently finished, Lee Child’s Past Tense.

Everybody has that black sheep family member, the one that starts political fights at Thanksgiving dinner. Or isn’t at Thanksgiving dinner because they’re in the pokey for writing bad checks. But Jack Reacher’s cousin takes the term black sheep a little too far in Lee Child’s book, Past Tense, my favorite Jack Reacher novel so far. I haven’t read nearly all of them, but several, and, while I enjoyed all of them, this one had the best story in my estimation.

It begins as pretty much all Reacher books do, with him randomly going somewhere by picking right or left at a fork in the road. If you’ve never read a Reacher novel, he’s a fearsome giant of a man who retired from the military after having grown up all over the world as the son of a military man. As a result, he has seen very little the United States. So, when he retires, his plan is to just wander around the country and see what he can see. He hitchhikes, walks, takes busses—whatever it takes. But the schtick of the books is that he’s constantly running into trouble by stepping into situations to help people, who are being put upon in some way by people in power. People abusing power really gets under his skin. This time, while traveling from Boston to his chosen destination of San Diego, he decides to take the long way around and visit his dad’s hometown of Laconia, NH, a place he’s never seen, but has heard about in family stories. Well, guess what? While he’s there, trying to find his dad’s old house, he steps in and busts up a guy who’s trying to molest a woman. And the guy he messes up just happens to be the son of the most powerful guy in town, a guy who just happens to be mobbed up. So, the police, while sympathetic and even a little glad the town bully has finally gotten some of what he deserves, are not happy about the revenge that is certainly going to rain down on their town if Reacher doesn’t skedaddle, something Reacher is not good at doing.

But the part of this particular book that makes it stand out to me is the parallel story that Child tells. Fully half of the book centers on two other characters, a Canadian couple named Shorty Fleck and Patty Sundstrom, who have the bad fortune of having their car break down near a secluded hotel that’s actually a front for, well, I won’t spoil it, but it’s probably as bad as you think, or maybe even worse. That’s where Reacher’s long lost bad guy cousin comes in. And that half of the story is by far the most compelling. The two plot threads are sewn together by the end, of course, making for a most satisfying conclusion.

Read this book. If you like Reacher books, this is a great one. It’s full of Reacher being Reacher, tougher and smarter than pretty much everyone he encounters. If you like mysteries with lots of twists and turns and victims that turn into heroes, you’ll love Patty and Shorty. If you just like a good, well-developed story, you’ll enjoy Past Tense by Lee Child.

Before I end, I’d like you to know I continue to make progress on my new Sam and Meg Stone Mystery, Hard as Stone. My hope is to have it out sometime this summer. In the meantime, if you haven’t already, I’d love for you to read book one in the series, Cast The First Stone. You can get it free for e-reader, except at Amazon, who just doesn’t play well with others. But even there, it’s only 99 cents. And, if you join my my mailing list, you have access to The Hound of the Island, a prequel novella about young Sam Stone and his buddy Cal Elder trying to solve the mystery of the appearance of a creepy glowing dog on Blennerhassett Island. You can join with the sign-up form, which you’ll find all over my page, but on my homepage for sure. And don’t forget–if you’ve read CTFS and liked it, reviews (on Goodreads or Amazon) are an indie author’s best friend!