“I was born as scared as anyone. Maybe more so. I lay awake crying with the best of them. But I got tired of it. I trained myself out of it. An act of will. I rerouted fear into aggression.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (MAY 18, 2010)

61 Hours alludes to a countdown that may presumably end in disaster. As the latest Lee Child thriller opens, a crooked lawyer conducts some shady business at a prison and then skids on the frozen roads of South Dakota, causing a bus carrying a driver, twenty seniors, and our hero, Jack Reacher, to crash into a ditch. Reacher, who is six foot five and physically fit, lends much-needed assistance to the bus driver and passengers, who are stranded near a town called Bolton. The local police send a rescue squad to bring in the victims before they freeze to death in the bitter cold.

As fans of this popular series know, Reacher is an ex-army man who travels around the country with no suitcase. He presents an imposing physical presence and his brainpower is as impressive as his stature. Wherever Jack goes, he gets involved in some sort of mayhem and this time is no exception. Because he has seen so much tragedy over the years, he has become a cynic and a pessimist. “Hope for the best, plan for the worst” is one of his mottoes.

Reacher soon becomes acquainted with an elderly woman named Janet Salter, who is the sole witness to a key drug transaction. Her testimony could help put away the leader of a large meth ring. Unfortunately, the bad guys know where she lives and have a strong motive to silence her. Salter, who is a classy, courageous, tough, quick-witted, and unpretentious lady, senses that Reacher is a kindred soul and the two quickly bond. Although Janet already has police protection, the setup is far from ideal. Reacher decides that she needs someone smart, strong, and resourceful to keep her safe—someone who can think out of the box and has the imagination and savvy to outwit and outfight most criminals. He appoints himself to the task. In addition, he provides miscellaneous advice and assistance to local law enforcement officials.

Unfortunately for Janet and Reacher, they are in more trouble than they realize. A sadistic criminal mastermind living in Mexico is planning a major operation, and he is pulling the strings in Bolton. In addition, Reacher is up against possible police corruption, a mystery concerning an old military installation, and a series of severe snowstorms and bitterly cold temperatures that make moving around difficult and dangerous. Events will eventually come to a critical mass when the mastermind and his henchmen converge on Bolton.

Throughout, Reacher remains fairly taciturn, although he does let his hair down a bit with Janet. He also confides a few secrets to the woman who has his old command, the CO of the elite 110th Special Unit based in Rock Creek, Virginia. She is a valuable liaison who provides Jack with critical information that will help him figure out what he is up against. In return, he helps her close a difficult case of her own. Child’s no-nonsense prose style, lavish use of rapid-fire dialogue, and suspenseful plot will keep readers invested in the book’s outcome. There are thrills aplenty here, violent confrontations, and an explosive and electrifying conclusion, during which Reacher is forced to make some tough and morally dubious decisions. The ambiguous finale may not please everyone; however, the author shows courage and originality in wrapping things up unconventionally. My one quibble is that the identity of one of the bad guys is telegraphed too early. Still, this humdinger of a thriller will brings chills to Reacher fans, even those who do not reside in a state where the mercury can dip to thirty degrees below zero.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 686 readers
PUBLISHER:	Delacorte Press; First Edition/First Printing edition (May 18, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lee Child (and Jack Reacher!)
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Affair Worth Dying For Gone Tomorrow Nothing to Lose Bad Luck and Trouble The Hard Way The Enemy

Bibliography:

• Killing Floor (1997) /
• Die Trying (1998)
• Tripwire (1999)
• Running Blind (2000)
• Echo Burning (2001)
• Without Fail (2002)
• Persuader (2003)
• The Enemy (2004)
• One Shot (2005)
• The Hard Way (2006)
• Bad Luck and Trouble (2007)
• Nothing to Lose (2008)
• Gone Tomorrow (2009)
• 61 Hours (2010)
• Worth Dying For (2010)
• The Affair (2011)
• A Wanted Man (2012)
• Never Go Back (September 2013)

Movies:

• Jack Reacher (May 2013)

“Twisted Tree…its graveled side streets and single café and stoplight, the hulks of reservation racers on cement blocks in dusty front yards, and the stone-pitted ranch pickups banging down the highway. ‘There’s nothing there, really,’ he said.”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (SEP 24, 2009)

In this remarkable impressionistic novel, author Kent Meyers focuses not on plot development and not on character analysis (however well developed the characters may be), but on the rippling effects of the death of young Hayley Jo Zimmerman on her community.  Meyers does not dwell on Hayley Jo’s fate for its drama or its sadness but for its seeming inevitability, a main theme throughout the novel.  Hayley Jo’s death, in turn, illuminates the choices the other residents make in their own lives and highlights the inevitability of their own fates.  As Meyers explores his metaphysical themes in earthy, naturalistic detail, Twisted Tree comes alive.  

In this small South Dakota town, everyone lives close to nature and close to the bone, a place where nothing is easy, and even less is certain. Working hard does not guarantee success, religion does not guarantee peace, and random events can make and destroy lives without warning. As Hayley Jo’s abductor himself observes very early in the novel, “Too much coincidence should raise suspicion, but it doesn’t work that way.  People will insist on meaning—in falling stars, rolls of dice, any kind of randomness.  It makes so much possible.”   And it is human nature, of course, for those in the community who have had any contact with Hayley Jo to insist on looking for meaning in the aftermath of her disappearance, often blaming themselves for what they did not do to prevent it, as if they might have changed her fate.

Dividing his novel into sixteen sections narrated by fifteen different characters, author Meyers shows their interrelationships with each other and their connections with Hayley Jo, ignoring the whole concept of time as he alternately explores past and present, shows how the diverse characters have known Hayley Jo, and builds the story of her death obliquely. Hayley Jo was a championship rodeo rider, excelling in barrel races, and she had been working hard to become a long-distance runner, pushing herself to the limit on every practice run. An anorexic, she had decided not to go to college, preferring to pursue her more physical goals instead. Her best friend Laura Mattingly, a running partner, worried about her anorexia but never informed anyone else, and Hayley Jo’s parents seem to have been oblivious to it.

As the novel evolves we meet a wide variety of characters who have had contact with her. A checker at a supermarket saw Hayley Jo and believed that she was “willfully dying.” A woman in her early thirties, who has become mentally disturbed through caring for her speechless, wheelchair-bound father for years, hears about Hayley Jo’s death and connects the details with her own fantasies. Eddie Little Feather knew Hayley Jo through the rodeo, and Shane Valen saw Hayley Jo being born when her parents could not make it to the hospital. Her parents agonize over her death, and her boyfriend, with whom she enjoyed fishing at age thirteen, has still not reconciled her breakup with him many years later.

Each of these characters, many of whom overlap in the shared memories of other characters, contributes to the picture of the community and of Hayley Jo, but just as importantly, Meyers shows how each of these characters also faces random disasters and, in some cases, causes them unwittingly. The characters (and we readers) may have free will to make decisions, but they (and we) have much less ability, if any, to control outcomes. Like life, these stories, though self-contained, are open-ended, their conclusions unpredictable, a point the author makes in the darkly humorous epilogue, which takes place on an Indian reservation on St. Patrick’s Day.

Although the novel requires careful reading and attention to repeating symbols and motifs, it is a finely created—and elegant—novel, despite its firm grounding in raw nature and in the everyday lives of the characters. There is not a cliché to be seen as Meyers, describing the sights, sounds, and smells of Twisted Tree, recreates the context in which the characters operate and try to find meaning in their lives. A house is an “agitation of lumber, an organ of rooms.” A trucker, finding buffalo on the road, believes that “time had leaked through a crack in itself, and the next thing he’d see was Indians on horses, chasing.” A man sleeping in an abandoned house can “hear the buffalo herd in the night, as if the night is softly grunting, the air muttering dark to the grass.” Someone looking at dead trees and tree trunks sees that “the trunks [have] erupted crystalline, spiking, the severed trees turned into mindless, blowsy birds.”

Meyers’s ability to bring the atmosphere to life is so strong that it overcomes whatever limitations one might expect of a novel in which the main character remains relatively unknown—and dead—and in which there is little mystery about her fate. He delves into the essence of life itself, telling stories and creating motifs which allow the reader to connect the themes and unite the characters and their histories. His acceptance of dreams and illusions and his inclusion of characters from both the white and the Native American cultures stretch our imaginations, challenge our thinking, and keep us entertained every step of the way. This is one of my favorite novels of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (September 24, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	Twisted Tree
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kent Meyers
EXTRAS:	An interview with Kent Meyers (not recent, but not much out there about him!)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of The Work of Wolves If you like this one, try: The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle

Bibliography:

• The River Warren (1998)
• The Witness of Combines (1998)
• Light in the Crossing (1999)
• The Work of Wolves (June 2004)
• Twisted Tree (September 2009)