Rachel is always ready to run – she’s a Reacher, born
with special powers and always hunted by the mysterious Institute. Always hunted,
always funning – always ready to hide even in this broken England, brought down
by economic disaster and war.
Now she has to run again – but she may have finally found
help, two brothers with an involved past, their own secrets ad a painful history
they are determined to resolve. If she helps them, she may have finally found
the allies she needs to survive and a life worth living
I really like this vision of dystopian England – one
brought apart from financial collapse and repeated wars that have brought the
country down. It hasn’t produced a complete wasteland – but it has produced a
very British seeming wasteland
The government and wealth has concentrated in the south east
– as the government collapsed they’ve focused on the south east and left much
of the rest of the country to fall into ruins torn by war (as a Yorkshireman I
am manfully resisting snarking whether this is a dystopia or contemporary. Yes
yes I am). London is still relatively wealthy and stable – but has carefully
isolated itself from the shanty town around it, fencing it in and creating a
lawless, corrupt land run by gangland. A gangland that could have come straight
from the pages of an old British gangster novel – or gangster documentary.
I like how very very British the book is – some books
have an excellent sign of time and place while others feel like just a name put
on a generic setting. This is England, beyond doubt.
And I love how this whole underworld plotline works. The almost
cartoonish characters, each with their own agendas and motives which makes for
a wonderful story of doublecross and not quite knowing who to trust as everyone
has secrets, everyone has their own agendas. On top of that we have a wonderful
sense of the old guard under threat. These gangsters have seen their empire
fall apart and are desperate to rebuild it – but to do so requires desperate
measures and a whole lot of paranoia. Everyone – from the Smith brothers trying
to recover from their loss, to Pinky trying to rebuild his empire to Rachel
trying to rebuild her life – everyone has lost something and everyone is trying
to rebuild. Thematically that sense of decline and stress is really excellently
conveyed.
