Bad Luck and Trouble

I went into Bad Luck and Trouble expecting the usual arrangement: a big man, a small town, one secret and a lot of people who would not tell him. What I got instead was a book about a police unit being picked off one name at a time, and about the man who left that unit behind and has been carrying the leaving ever since. It is the eleventh Jack Reacher novel and the first one I finished and immediately wanted to argue with.

Lee Child published it in the United Kingdom on 2 April 2007 with Bantam Press, and in the United States on 15 May 2007 with Delacorte Press. The American hardcover I used runs 384 pages and carries the ISBN 9780385340557. It sits in the middle of the run, after The Hard Way and before Nothing to Lose, in a series that started with Killing Floor in 1997 and has now run past thirty books. The title comes from Albert King's song "Born Under a Bad Sign", which does double duty here. There is the bad luck itself, which is what the 110th has been having, and there is the older sense of a person who cannot lose. The dedication page reads "For the real Frances L. Neagley", because a fan called Frances Neagley won a charity auction at the Bouchercon convention for the right to have a character named after her, and Child gave her the best role in the book.

A thousand and thirty dollars

The book opens with a killing, and the killing is quiet. Calvin Franz, a former military policeman, is loaded onto a Bell 222 helicopter with both legs broken and strapped to a stretcher. They fly him over the California desert, fifty miles north-east of Los Angeles, and push him out of the open door at three thousand feet.

Seventeen days later Jack Reacher is checking his bank balance at an ATM in Portland, Oregon, and finds that exactly $1,030 has been deposited. He reads the number as a military police radio code, 10-30, the signal for assistance required. The deposit came from Frances Neagley, who was a sergeant in his old unit and who has stayed in touch with him for years without ever bothering him.

Neagley meets him in California and gives him the rest. Franz is dead. The rest of the unit is disappearing.

The smallness of that number is the best decision in the book. Child could have opened with a phone call or a letter, and either would have worked. The deposit says something a phone call would not: that the sender had to assume no letter would arrive, no phone would be answered, and no meeting could be arranged safely. One thousand and thirty dollars, read correctly, is the whole argument for why Reacher is the only person who can be trusted with this.

The 110th

The 110th MP Special Investigations Unit was a small elite team, and the signal Neagley used was one that only its members would recognise. Military police were the army's own internal police, and a special investigations unit was the part of them that took the awkward cases, usually ones involving service members accused of serious offences. Reacher commanded the 110th. Then he left the army, and the book is really about the fact that he left those particular people behind.

Reacher's guilt is not the loud kind. He does not brood about it in set-piece flashbacks and he does not make a speech about duty. It comes out in the way he listens to Neagley, in the way he immediately gets on a plane, and in the way the team works: they are all former military police, so every conversation is also a conversation about the old days, and every joke is somebody covering for somebody. Child has said that he wanted Reacher to wobble a little for once, to measure himself against the people he had served with, and the wobble shows mostly in the silences.

Neagley is the reason any of this gets off the ground, and the book is careful about that. She is the one who decided that a code sent through a bank meant a friend was in trouble, and the one who put the deposit there. Child says the book is about old colleagues he had not seen for ten years, and she is the one who reached out. She is also the one who tells Reacher the truth about how little the army cared about any of it, which is the argument the book is really having.

The surviving members come back one at a time. David O'Donnell is there, and Neagley brings along Karla Dixon, a forensic accountant from New York who joined the military and then stopped. The dead and the missing have names too. Manuel Orozco and Jorge Sanchez had been working out of Las Vegas, and Tony Swan was the one who had been working inside New Age and then stopped answering his phone. None of them are given a face until Reacher goes looking, which is deliberate. They are a list of names on a report before they are people, and the book's whole argument is about turning them back into people.

New Age and Little Wing

The thing at the centre of the book is a defence contractor called New Age, and the thing inside New Age is a project with a code name. Little Wing is an anti-missile technology, the kind of hardware designed to knock a missile out of the sky, which New Age has managed to shrink down small enough to sit inside a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile. That is a genuinely frightening object, and the fact that it exists at all is the best idea in the novel.

What New Age does with it is rotten in a quiet, bureaucratic way. The company builds working missile electronics units and then condemns them as defective, so that they can be sold on at a profit to an arms broker. The broker is a man named Azhari Mahmoud, who has four aliases and $65 million to spend and no idea how to use what he is buying. The unit that does the condemning is Edward Dean, the engineer who developed the system and who now runs quality control at New Age, and he is forced to sign off on 650 working missiles as defective while somebody holds his fourteen-year-old daughter over him. Margaret Berenson in human resources is kept quiet with threats to her son.

The people running the cover-up are Curtis Mauney and Allen Lamaison. Mauney is a detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Lamaison runs security at New Age, and used to be a police officer, and Mauney was his old partner on the force. That is the detail that tells you how the arrangement works: this is not a company conspiracy with an outside criminal attached, it is two old colleagues running a private system, and the company is the cover.

The missing men

The investigation is the part of the book that most rewards patience, and it is done the way Child always does it, by going to rooms and asking questions. Reacher and Neagley visit Franz's widow and find his office cleared out. They find flash memory sticks in his business post-office box and cannot get into them. At the New Age plant they are received by an HR manager who lies to them.

O'Donnell cracks the password on Franz's drives and they find a set of numbers that look like musical scores and the name Azhari Mahmoud with four aliases attached. Then they go to Tony Swan's house in Santa Ana and find his German shepherd dead of thirst and no sign of Swan. Three of the unit's men have gone to ground, and Swan is the one nobody can find, and for a while the team half suspects he sold them out.

They pick up a thread on the street when a man they have been following turns out to be Thomas Brant, an Orange County deputy operating outside his own jurisdiction. Mauney sends them more: details of Sanchez's death, and Las Vegas police evidence on a man called Adrian Mount, who is one of Mahmoud's aliases. There is an assassination attempt on the team, which they survive and answer by taking the shooter's vehicle, which Reacher recognises from the lot outside their hotel in Los Angeles. Neagley also pulls strings with a staffer for a member of the House defense committee, a woman named Diana Bond whom the team does not entirely trust.

One of the best things Child does with the conspiracy is keep it small and stupid. The arms buyer does not have an ideology, he has a purchase order.

Mauney and Lamaison

The trap closes in Las Vegas. Mauney tells them a man is in hospital, and when they go there O'Donnell and Dixon are taken by Mauney's men and handed to Lamaison. Reacher and Neagley find Mauney instead, take the suitcase with the $65 million in it, and Reacher kills him.

Then the last set piece, and the one Publishers Weekly singled out as one of Child's more satisfying finales. At the New Age facility in Highland Park, Reacher stows away on the company helicopter just before Lamaison loads the two of them onto it, bound, with the clear intention of throwing them out of the door the way Franz, Orozco, Sanchez and Swan were thrown. Reacher kills Lamaison's assistant and pushes Lamaison out of the aircraft to his death. The helicopter lands, and Reacher asks the pilot whether he flew each of the murder flights. The pilot says yes. Reacher kills the pilot too, because a pilot who will do that will do it again.

The official website for the novel runs one line from it as the pull quote, and it is Reacher talking about the men in the helicopter:

"You don't throw my friends out of helicopters and live to tell the tale."

The loose end is Mahmoud, who has turned up at Dean's desert house to be handed the hardware, and who cannot work the hardware himself. Reacher poses as the New Age engineer, lets him walk into the house, and then they tie him up and leave him for the FBI.

Then the accounting, which is the part I liked best. The team takes the criminals' money and sets up trust funds for the families of the men who were killed, one of them a donation to PETA in the name of Tony Swan, whose only family was his dog. And at the very end Reacher finds two more deposits in his account. One is $101,810.18, which reads as the military police code 10-18 twice over: mission accomplished, twice. The other is $10,012, which is a zip code in Greenwich Village, and it belongs to Karla Dixon. He thinks about going to New York. Then he remembers that he does not make plans, withdraws $100, and buys a ticket on the first bus going out of the station with no idea where it is headed.

What works and what does not

The heart of this book is not the thriller. The thriller is the frame, and it is a good frame, but the thing the book is actually about is loyalty and guilt, and it wears that subject badly disguised. Reacher has spent most of his adult life walking away from things. Here he walks towards one, and the walking is the payoff.

The characters are the strongest part. Neagley is the reason to keep reading, because she is the one who refused to let him go, and because Child gives her competence rather than heroism. Dixon is a great late addition, a civilian accountant who talks in numbers and turns out to be braver than anyone in uniform. And the small details are the ones that land: the dog dead of thirst in a locked house, the flash drives with scores on them, the pilot who says yes.

The conspiracy, though, is thinner than the character work, and I think the book knows it. There is no great revelation about the arms trade, no twist about why America wants these missiles, no moral difficulty in the last third. New Age is a company that has decided to sell its products twice, the villains are two former cops and a buyer with no ideology, and the ending is a man who cannot stop hitting people. Reacher solves it by being Reacher.

The violence is the usual Reacher violence, and in this book it has a particular edge because the bodies belong to his friends. People get tortured, thrown out of helicopters, and have their necks broken. Child has said that for him the killing is a metaphor for closure, that everyone is in a bad situation at some point, and that fiction at least shows direct action taken. I understand the argument and I still put the book down for a day after the helicopter.

The other thing worth knowing is that Reacher is at his most human here. Janet Maslin in the New York Times said the novel unfolds with a logic that makes the series so easy to get hooked on, and Publishers Weekly praised the banter and the eye-for-an-eye finale. Both are right. This is the eleventh of thirty-one and it is one of the ones where the machine briefly looks like it is about a person.

The second season of the television adaptation of Reacher, which premiered in December 2023, is built on this book. It renames several characters and moves the action east, but the helicopter is still there.

It is not the best Reacher novel. Plenty of readers rate The Hard Way and Killing Floor higher. But it is the one where Child asks what his hero owes the people he left, and I would not want the whole series to be like it and I am glad that one of them is.