Make Me, by Lee Child

Jack Reacher gets off the train in a small town because he is intrigued by the name: Mother's Rest.  This is the set up for Lee Child's Make Me, the 20th Jack Reacher novel.  Reacher asks around, and no one knows where the name came from--or they won't tell him.  Of course Reacher can't leave well enough alone, so his quick one-day stop turns into an investigation.  He happens to meet a female P.I. who is in town looking for her missing partner.  They team up to uncover the nefarious secret of Mother's Rest.

Make Me follows the familiar model of Reacher exposing a tiny town's secret criminal underbelly.  Mother's Rest is far off the beaten path, well outside of cell coverage.  A town-wide conspiracy of silence protects a criminal enterprise, the nature of which Reacher and his P.I. friend slowly discover.  The initial discovery is horrible, very illegal, but, in Reacher's mind, perhaps justifiable.  However, the pieces still don't fit and the ultimate reveal is beyond anything he imagined.  Reacher brings justice with his trademark brand of justice: kill 'em all and then disappear.

One distinction of Make Me is that Reacher actually meets an opponent who is better than Reacher anticipated.  Reacher takes him out, of course, but he got some good blows on Reacher, including a blow to the head.  The effects linger through the rest of the book, impacting his ability to be Reacher.  It makes me wonder if, in future books, Reacher will have to slow down and admit he's getting older, or if he'll heal up and this won't bother him again.  In any case, it's a rare admission by Child that Reacher is human after all.

Make Me follows the Reacher formula, with enough twists and turns to keep fans coming back for more.  The "small town covering up pure evil" trope might be getting old, though.  I wondered about the logistics, the secrecy, the longevity of the scheme.  It just seemed like too much to have sustained for as long as they have apparently sustained it.  Apart from that, Make Me is a worthy addition to the life story of Jack Reacher.