Book review: 'The Affair'

Book: The Affair
Author: Lee Child
Publisher: Bantam Books
Pages: 526
Price: Rs325

Can a book pass off as a thriller if the first nine chapters take the reader ten days to plod through? Or if sleep creeps up on you by the end of each of those chapters? Lee Child’s 16th Jack Reacher tale fails these essential thriller-tests. It stands no chance with first-time readers at least.

With lines like “Civilians, both of them analysts of some kind, which was exactly what I wanted. Independent eyeballs…” or “…sometimes if you want to know for sure whether the stove is hot, the only way to find out is to touch it,” you really can’t keep up hope, can you? When at the end of chapter five, Reacher declares in his characteristic, by now familiar, grandiose tone: “[…] the clock in my head woke me at five, two hours before the dawn, on Friday, the 7th of March, 1997. The first day of the rest of my life,” you straighten your back, hoping for some excitement. But no. You have to wait. To Child’s credit, just about a second before we gave up on Reacher, he shook us up out of slumber and gave us a roller-coaster ride.

For the uninitiated, Jack Reacher is a tough-as-tough-can-be military cop, who can take on six well-armed, burly men, and beat them all up to a pulp in as much time as it would take most of us to decide whether to fight or flee. His sense of duty doesn’t confine itself to merely catching the wrongdoers. He is a walking, wise-cracking justice system. Bad guys will be shot without a second thought — unless they meet a more innovative death.

The Affair is set in 1997, four years before 9/11 turned the US into a paranoid country. In a small town in Mississippi, a young woman has her throat cut close to a high-priority military base. Our undercover hero is sent there by the army to find out if the killer is a soldier, and if so, to cover up and prevent a possible scandal that could rock the establishment. The backdrop is the secret American military presence in Kosovo. The county sheriff in charge of the murder investigation is the stunningly beautiful, almost-as-smart-as-Reacher Elizabeth Deveraux. Predictably, all the male cops working with her are dumb, and the clever sheriff can’t do without Reacher’s wisdom. It took him about a minute to figure out vital clues that she had missed earlier, and he wastes no time enlightening her.

The pace picks up dramatically from chapter ten, if you can manage to hold on till then. There is comic relief provided through Reacher’s wisecracks along the way. Implausible, illogical scenarios can also amuse. The sex scenes between Reacher and Deveraux are hilarious, with every bit precisely timed; each kiss and move, right down to the orgasm. Obviously, it was nominated for the 2011 Bad Sex award. So should you try The Affair? Yes, if you plenty of time to kill, and testosterone overdose is your thing.