Personal by Lee Child

Published by Delacorte Press on September 2, 2014

I would put Personal in the bottom half of the stack of Reacher novels. Although it is far from the strongest entry in the series, it has merit. Fans of the series will find that Personal adds nothing significant to Reacher's character, but that would be difficult to do in a series that has run for nineteen novels.

John Kott, a man Reacher arrested as an MP sixteen years earlier, is one of a handful of suspects who may have taken a shot at the president of France. The British and Americans are worried that Kott (and/or other assassins) will try to kill the British Prime Minister and other world leaders during an EU meeting in London. Reacher is tasked with investigating Kott but his real mission is to act as bait. Accompanying him on his mission is a CIA liaison to the State Department named Casey Nice. Occasionally Reacher is helped or hindered by a British agent named Bennett.

The plot of Personal takes Reacher to France and England as he searches for Kott. In furtherance of that mission, he needs to figure out whether Kott has actually been hired as an assassin and, if so, where and how he will attempt to fire his next fatal shot. That quest allows Reacher to mix it up with some thugs in the English underworld, providing ample opportunity for the hand-to-hand fight scenes that Child writes so well. That plot, in itself, would be too easy, and so hidden agendas come into play that give the story some added intrigue, although they don't really materialize until the final chapter.

As always, Child's secondary characters are interesting and convincing. Still, an attempt to portray Nice as weak and potentially unreliable because of her dependence on anti-anxiety medication struck me as unnecessary and condescending. The novel tells a conventional story that is in most (but not all) respects predictable, but it is executed with the skill a reader would expect from Child. The story moves quickly and the questions that puzzle Reacher are answered cleverly. That's barely enough to earn a recommendation, but Personal left me wondering if Child is running out of gas.

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