Come for the family history. Stay for the deeply satisfying application of Reacher’s fist.
I really need to stop pretending my audiobooks are going to stay in the car. This one escaped the vehicle more than once because I needed to know what happened next.
Reacher is on his way to San Diego when he sees a sign for Laconia, New Hampshire. His father, Stan Reacher, was born there, so Reacher does what Reacher does. He changes direction. He decides to poke around a little, see the old family home, and learn something about where his father came from. Naturally, nothing is quite that simple.
While Reacher is digging into his family history, a young Canadian couple named Patty and Shorty are traveling through the area when their car breaks down. They end up stranded at a remote motel where the owners seem helpful enough at first.
Their situation goes from inconvenient to creepy to absolutely horrifying. There are some truly evil people in this world, and Lee Child apparently rounded up several of them and put them in one place. The more I figured out what was happening at that motel, the more horrified I became. It became impossible to hit the pause button.
Of course, those particular evil people have one rather significant problem they don't know about yet. Jack Reacher is in the neighborhood.
Child keeps Reacher's search for his family history and Patty and Shorty's nightmare running separately for much of the book. I knew they had to come together eventually, but I couldn't figure out exactly how he was going to do it. Those evil people needed to meet Reacher. Or, at the very least, Reacher's fist.
I also really enjoyed learning more about Stan Reacher. Reacher goes to Laconia thinking he knows the basic story of his father's childhood and discovers that some of what he knows doesn't add up. One revelation in particular finally explains something that has popped up before in the series: why Stan could never remember his own birthday. I love when a long-running series reaches back and answers a question I didn't even realize I was still carrying around.
And, because this was an audiobook, Scott Brick deserves some of the credit for those five stars. His narration kept me completely invested in both storylines. After spending this many books with Reacher, the voice matters, and Brick did a great job bringing him, and the suspense, to life.
Past Tense gave me everything I want from a Reacher novel: mystery, suspense, truly awful bad guys, some fascinating Reacher family history and the enormous satisfaction of knowing that some very evil people have absolutely no idea who just wandered into their general vicinity.
They really should have picked a different motel.
