Lee Child is a quiet, undemonstrative man who is phlegmatic about his success in the thriller field. The Enemy will no doubt attract the usual enthusiastic acclaim, and it deserves to. One thing that is guaranteed to please Child is the open-mouthed astonishment of American readers who learn that this writer of the most idiomatic American thrillers (with brilliantly realised US locales) is actually English. But there's never a sense of striving for effects in such taut Child novels as Killing Floor and Die Trying. Child simply delivers the goods, US-style--and The Enemy is no exception.

Child's usual protagonist, the tough and resourceful Jack Reacher, is in North Carolina on New Year's Day, 1990. Elsewhere, world-shaking events are underway, such as the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. But Jack's job as a Military Police Duty Officer has him concerned with what initially seem to be less significant happenings: a soldier has been found dead in a sleazy motel and when Jack goes to the house of the soldier (a two-star general) to inform his wife, he finds her also dead. Needless to say, events in another part of the globe are having fatal repercussions in the US, and Reacher is soon up to his neck, with the body count rising.

As a glimpse into the early life of Jack Reacher (now securely one of the most admired heroes in contemporary thriller writing), this is meat and drink to the Child aficionado. Child foregrounds characterisation in his pacy narratives, and this eighth outing for Jack has all the adrenalin-producing qualities of its predecessors. --Barry Forshaw

2008-05-12 Clipped prose leavened with irony and wit.

It's become quite popular, it seems. Going back in time. Reviewing beginnings. Take Smallville, the early years of Superman. Or Enterprise, the pre-Shatner Star Trek universe. And then there's Casino Royale, the Bond movies going back to his early Secret Service days. Here, Lee Child does something similar with his hero, telling us about Jack Reacher's time in the Army - at the beginning of the 1990s, as the Berlin Wall started coming down - before he became a rootless civilian.

We get the usual clipped prose leavened with irony and wit. Reacher is a hard man and doesn't like bad people. So when he finds himself mysteriously re-assigned out of Panama to a relative backwater, he starts asking questions - until he is called out to investigate the apparent natural death of a two-star general. Then he starts getting answers, the kind that don't sit well with his strong sense of fairness. The conspiracy he uncovers seems to go a long way up. Here we get to see how the Reacher we know developed.

As a special investigator in the Army, he doesn't care about rank and its privileges, only the truth. When a colonel asks him how the general died, Reacher replies, `He had a heart attack.' The colonel persists: `Where?' Reacher: `Inside his chest cavity.' There's plenty of this dry, clipped humour.

But there's more here than a mystery. We get to meet Jack Reacher's brother Joe and his mother. There are some poignant moments, especially on grieving. It comes as no surprise, having read the detailed earlier seven novels, that Child manages to make you believe he actually served in the US Army, rather than being a British-born TV producer who took up writing after being made redundant.

`Storywise,' he says, `I was probably pointed in the right direction by the John D McDonald's Travis McGee series most of all, plus a little Spenser, with a seasoning of Alistair MacLean...' when creating Jack Reacher.

Apparently he latched onto the name when in a supermarket. As he's tall, he's often asked by little old ladies to reach up to the top shelves for them. So his wife Jane commented, `Hey, if this writing thing doesn't pan out, you could always be a reacher in a supermarket.' Reacher, he thought - a good name. And a great character.