Janet Maslin

Reacher moved on. He always does. But Child and Jane, his wife of 44 years, decided to stay.

Now, with a Reacher TV project in the works and the 24th novel in the series on the way (titled “Blue Moon,” it will arrive on Child’s 65th birthday, Tuesday), I am in Laramie to have coffee in a diner with Reacher’s creator. As any devotee knows, Reacher spends a lot of time in diners. He downs amounts of coffee that would put most people on life support. He sits with his back to the wall, eats like a trencherman and gets acquainted with the waitress. He wants her to remember him, because it might be handy.

But here in the real world, I’m meeting the reedy, 6-foot-4 Child — actual name, James Dover Grant — and not his brawnier, inch-taller hero. Laramie has no real diner. It’s got a place that serves cappuccino and arty beer that, Child confirms, Reacher would be “bemused by.” Sitting in a booth with his back to the wall, Child faces a rainbow flag; Laramie is where Matthew Shepard was killed for being gay 21 years ago, and this city of 32,000 continues to honor his memory. We’re directly across the street from two bookstores. Outside their doors, few people know that a best-selling author has started spending three months of the year nearby.

Child drinks a meager half cup of coffee, claiming to have had a whole pot at home. He insists on paying the check, either out of gallantry or for tax reasons. Then we climb into his distinctly un-Reacher-like electric blue SUV and begin a drive straight out of his novel. He lives 40 or 50 miles from town. The intersection closest to his roost is a 10-minute drive away. That’s also where the paved road ends.

The sky is as big as skies get. The high prairie is golden. Miles of dirt road lead upward to an immaculate, rustic house with decks on three sides. Unobstructed views stretch 20 miles into the distance. Child’s place is on 35 acres, protected by thousands of acres of forest, lakes and ranch land. It all cost less than he got for the 900-square-foot apartment on 22nd Street in New York City where he used to live. If you want to relocate to the middle of nowhere, this is how it’s done.

Child, an Englishman, has gone native. He’s dressed in boots, jeans, T-shirt and a leather barn coat. He owns two cowboy hats but didn’t wear one for this interview “for fear of making you laugh.” He already lived here when he wrote “The Midnight Line” and acknowledges that describing a familiar setting was more satisfying than making one up. Though Wyoming’s renown as a tax haven was a factor in his move, he says, the decision had “more to do with an immigrant’s sense that there’s always somewhere else to explore.” (Child and his wife have numerous homes, including one above St. Tropez and a spread in East Sussex, England, that he bought for bragging rights after growing up poor. He still spends time at an apartment he owns on Central Park West, but Jane has decided she’s through with New York.)

The Laramie area also happens to abut Colorado, where recreational marijuana is legal. Child made waves when he talked about being a regular user; his habit goes back 50 years. He finds it especially handy for reading his work, claiming the high helps him judge his writing. And he likes doing actors’ voices: Tony Curtis, a pretty good Michael Caine.

As we approach the house for lunch, Child proudly points out a few landmarks. The address number is printed in a clean font and hangs from a sturdy post. He did that himself. The generator on the hillside got them through all of last winter. To the right of the driveway sits what Child calls his rockery. Since his hands, unlike Reacher’s, aren’t the size of small animals, he’s dexterous enough to treat this tiny garden lovingly. So does Jane, who has arranged some low, heathery sprigs in a small vase for lunchtime.

Their 39-year-old daughter, Ruth, who studied forensic linguistics and will move to Fort Collins, Colorado, later this year, has come by for the occasion. She and her mother have made lunch. “It was supposed to be tuna niçoise, but we all like different things,” Jane says; these three are strong willed as well as close-knit. So lunch means a different kind of tuna salad for each of them and a highly entertaining debate about apostrophe usage. Ruth was only about 7 when she went to a market with her father and asked, “Dad, shouldn’t that sign say ‘10 items or fewer?’ ”

Jim and Jane, as they’re known here, have made local friends. But they’re both voracious readers (she is a dedicated environmentalist), and they’re mostly home alone. The place is set up for that. Their work areas are far apart, and he has lucked into the best room in the house as his office: double height and mostly glass with a fireplace. It should be the master bedroom. But the noisy furnace room below ruled that out, so here are two desks face to face, one for Reacher projects and the other for correspondence; plus high piles of books for Lee Child’s recreational reading; the longest available leather sofa, which still isn’t long enough; and a golden trophy shaped like a pen nib, the 2019 British Book Award for author of the year, on the otherwise bare shelves.

(Child will receive another award, the Commander of the British Empire, in February, though his fierce objections to the British class system make him reluctant to bow to the royal family member presenting it. What if that turns out to be the queen? “She is tiny,” Child says, “so there’ll be a certain amount of craning, which might pass for a bow.”)

The study is also where Child is taking on a major new job: the Reacher TV reboot, for Amazon. Earlier this decade, when Paramount made a couple of Reacher movies starring Tom Cruise, Child knew better than to cede full control of his popular character. He sold the rights to two films, with the condition that he’d have to sign off on any others. After Reacher fans complained that Cruise was too small to play the big bruiser, and Cruise coaxed the first film’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, to his “Mission: Impossible” franchise, Paramount decided two Reacher films were enough. And along came streaming.

Child settled on Amazon rather than Netflix or any other streaming service in part because of the synergy it allowed. Every time he publishes a book, Amazon delivers a lot of copies. The company is willing to advertise the show on its book packaging and email a link to Child’s readers. So he’s begun work on what could be an eight-year project.

The TV Reacher will be large, very large, and in his 30s or 40s. (The lead hasn’t been cast yet; an Army boot is waiting for the right Mr. Cinderella.) The series will start where the books did. “Echo Burning,” the first Reacher novel, will anchor Season 1, with other books picked over for subplots. Child will supervise the screenplays but not write them and will help reinvent Reacher from the ground up. Or Reachers, plural. The one in “Blue Moon” is older, hipper, richer and hotter than previous incarnations. He doesn’t wear Army surplus. He likes black. He knows about performance art. And he gets into a sustained sexual relationship as well as a vicious gang war between Ukrainians and Albanians.

“I wanted him completely out of his comfort zone,” Child says. “He’s capable of getting comfortable pretty quick.”

From the looks of it, so is his maker.

This article originally appeared in

Jack Reacher Is Still Restless. But His Creator Has Settled Down.

LARAMIE, Wyo. — Two books ago, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher passed through the southeast corner of Wyoming in his efforts to track down the owner of a pawned West Point ring. The book was “The Midnight Line,” and it was unusually transporting for a Reacher thriller. You could visualize the immense flat expanses of old railroad land stretching toward the foothills of the Rockies, the long miles of dirt road down which anyone could disappear under a vast open sky.

<h1>There’s a spoiled little girl in “Big Sky,” the long-overdue fifth book in Kate Atkinson’s irresistible Jackson Brodie private eye series, who has a closet full of princess costumes. Her mother wants her to grow up in a fairy tale, the kind where toy unicorns belong. Atkinson sneaks this into “Big Sky” so casually that it doesn’t resonate until exactly when the author wants it to. That’s her M.O. in all the Brodie books, but it’s never worked better than it does in “Big Sky.”</h1>

That’s because Brodie’s past is by now very complicated. So Atkinson has a lot of breadcrumbs to toss around. And her new book’s plot is crowded in its own right, which means that “Big Sky” — the first Brodie novel since 2010 — begins as a leisurely panorama of new characters, favorite old ones (like Reggie Chase, the teenage nanny and amateur sleuth from “When Will There Be Good News?,” now a full-fledged detective), vividly contrasting new settings (a bawdy nightclub, a snobbish golf course) and, finally, Brodie himself.

By some strange alchemy, Jackson Brodie is both the heart of these books and the least interesting character in them. Atkinson upstages him all the time. In “Big Sky,” he’s working a routine infidelity case on behalf of a suspicious wife (whose husband, it is discovered, has “indulged in bridled passion” with his girlfriend) when he stumbles onto something awful enough to subvert that little girl’s princess/unicorn fantasyland.

But he doesn’t do it alone and there’s a lot else going on here, all of it rendered with Atkinson’s vastly enjoyable nonchalance. When Brodie has to take care of Dido, the dog of Brodie’s ex-partner Julia, with whom he shares a son (it’s complicated) and Dido growls at some rowdy teenage boys, Brodie asks her: “Really? You and what wolf?” Reggie and her female teammate are so tough that they earn the nickname “the Kray Twins,” after two of Britain’s most notorious killers.

As Atkinson recently told The Guardian, “Big Sky” began as a screenplay with a female lead. Atkinson has said that she loves Netflix, attributes the same feeling to Brodie, and has had a previous Brodie book, “Case Histories,” adapted for PBS. It all shows. This book has a lot of drastic scene changes, is packed with minor characters and is in no hurry to get where it’s going.

But somehow Atkinson never seems to be treading water. As she introduces a crew of old buddies who gravitate toward the posh Belvedere Golf Club, she opens up a whole world of awful marriages, alarming betrayals and, in the case of the richest member of the group, a first wife who accidentally fell off a cliff before a second, trophy wife could be acquired. The other women in this circle tend to get very quiet when thinking about this.

Then there’s the early scene that establishes the plot: a scammy “businessman” who cons foreign women into coming to Yorkshire, where the book is set. We don’t know who he is or what he has to do with the rest of the story, but we know that human trafficking lies somewhere beneath the polite socializing with which Atkinson pairs it. It’s just a matter of time before she catalyzes Brodie, Reggie and the others to start tearing the scab off this thing.

There is no stray anything in “Big Sky.” That’s one big reason Atkinson’s devotees love her. No detail is too small to come home to roost; as with Tana French, with whom she is justly compared for writing mayhem-centric books that should not be regarded as genre fiction, it’s worth rereading the beginning once you’ve finished this novel just to see how well the author has manipulated you. Atkinson is also adept at weaving the mundane details of her characters’ lives (or perhaps her own) into the Brodie books as a way of humanizing them, despite the stark malevolence that lurks beneath this workaday surface.

Brodie has been assailed for his unenlightened attitudes about women. Let’s just say he’s a retired cop who’s maybe a little old school, maybe a lot. Atkinson seems so determined to counter that criticism that in this book she puts Harvey Weinstein’s name on a list right between Trotsky’s and Hitler’s. She also pits Brodie against pedophiles and sexual predators in a story that’s all too credible today. But she’s not about to rebuild him from the ground up; when stuck minding the teenage son he barely knows, he’s a lousy parent and not sorry about it. (To be fair, he does get better: Once he learns to use the word “wankers,” he has an easier time communicating with his son.) Brodie has been Atkinson’s most popular character for good reason. He was interestingly broken, so she hasn’t fixed him.

Atkinson opens “Big Sky” with one perfect page. It’s a bit of a red herring, but it couldn’t do a better job of throwing the reader off base and commanding instant interest. It’s a short chapter called “Eloping,” and if you have a way of looking at it, do. It’s a prime example of how Atkinson tells a great story, toys with expectations, deceives by omission, blows smoke and also writes like she’s your favorite friend. Thank goodness the long Jackson Brodie hiatus is over.

Publication Notes:

391 pages. Little, Brown &amp; Co. $28.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/books/review/kate-atkinson-jackson-brodie-big-sky.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

A literary detective returns to find trouble in the country club set

That’s because Brodie’s past is by now very complicated. So Atkinson has a lot of breadcrumbs to toss around.

Luxembourg was just unfamiliar enough to lend an air of suspicion to the supposedly blah activities in which Pavone’s “expats” engaged. Relocated from Washington, D.C., they were Dexter Moore, who did something vague involving computer technology, and his wife, Kate, who had worked for the State Department. Kate was now a bored housewife, except that she was really a spy.

Now, in his fourth novel, “The Paris Diversion,” Pavone has decided to make “The Expats” a series, Kate its heroine and Paris its latest setting. If this sounds abrupt, it should. He has laid only the flimsiest groundwork for such a drastic swivel. “The Expats” was so intricate that it is essential to read it before tackling the sequel. If you pick up “The Paris Diversion” cold, you’ll spend a lot of time wondering who the Moores are, what happened to them in Luxembourg (not to mention what happened during Kate’s long career in espionage before she married Dexter) and what residue of problems and enemies are brought to this touristy new book.

“The Paris Diversion” provides an unearned frisson from the fact that its sections are named for Paris’ most famous places, with accompanying photos. One, of course, is Notre Dame, pictured here in all its undamaged glory and used by Pavone in the most gimmicky way. The Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées and the Louvre provide other picture-postcard backdrops for the book’s plot. There are also visits to Venice and an aerial view of the Matterhorn. If you’re the kind of reader who thinks such touches need justification, this book is not for you.

With its events confined to the space of a single business day, the book stages a couple of horrendous crises. First, there is a multi-phased terrorist takeover of the plaza outside the Louvre, which leaves tourists running and screaming, with a stereotypically Islamic-looking man standing alone in the vast space with a stereotypical suitcase bomb chained to his wrist. Without spoilers it is impossible to offer an appraisal of the way this tactic is used — by the characters and, more important, by the author.

Second, there are the smooth moves by which an arrogant CEO and his too-beautiful young assistant are whisked out of their office and off to a secure location — on the very day that the CEO’s company stands to generate a great deal of money for its investors. A lot is riding on the pair’s whereabouts. Yet hours pass and they are not heard from ... and there had better be something really major going on here, hadn’t there? The idea that the key word in “The Paris Diversion” is “diversion,” and that we are being put through something very petty, is just unthinkable.

“The Paris Diversion” does have a tight, extremely clever bit of exposition, in which all its diverse pieces suddenly fall into place and its many red herrings are exposed as empty trickery. But it comes much too late to compensate for the fact that Pavone has given readers an elaborate house of cards, not a scheme built on anything substantial.

Dexter doesn’t loom that large in the book’s machinations. But Kate must carry most of it on her duplicitous shoulders. She stays active, and uses up a lot of verbs in the process. She scouts, sizes up, remembers, secures (her job, which has been in peril), rushes toward (a bomb everyone else in Paris is fleeing), realizes, foils, avenges and otherwise stays astonishingly busy. If only the book could match her energy level.

Pavone can do so much more with her. He has been well worth reading since “The Expats,” through both “The Accident” (2014) and “The Travelers” (2016), because of his exceptional plotting and pacing. This is his first eyebrow-raiser. Building a series around Kate Moore seems like a fine idea. She started out as a skilled professional, and Pavone began by winning an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. But he and Kate need to do more than blow smoke.

This article originally appeared in <a id="2570e3a6-57e4-4eb7-899d-7e6ddf7fbb8a" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/books/review-paris-diversion-chris-pavone.html">The New York Times</a>.

In the sequel to 'The Expats,' a spy stumbles

(Books of The Times): Debuts as sexy as Chris Pavone’s “The Expats” (2012) are rare. Pavone had previously worked in cookbook publishing. When that career became a fallen soufflé, he accompanied his wife and young sons to Luxembourg, which became the intriguingly offbeat setting for his first novel, an uncommonly devious espionage thriller.

Of all the blows delivered by Don Winslow’s Cartel trilogy, none may be as devastating as the timing of “The Border,” its stunner of a conclusion. Though Winslow cannot have engineered all of this 14 years ago when he started this series, his sweeping new novel concerns subjects that put it right on the culture’s front burner: the Mexican-American border, the handling of migrant children, the opioid crisis and some barely fictionalized claims about how foreign money has bought influence at the highest level of the U.S. government.

The book’s title, “The Border,” refers to both physical and moral barriers. Winslow is well aware that both that and its cover image, which depicts a razor-wire-topped wall spreading across a desert landscape, are politically loaded. “Loaded phrases, like loaded guns, are more interesting, aren’t they?” Winslow said to Entertainment Weekly in September.

As for the book’s depiction of fiercely partisan U.S. politics, including its treatment of characters who are unmistakable versions of the current president and his son-in-law: “I know this book is going to make some people angry. I can live with that.”

Even though the first installment of this trilogy was named “The Power of the Dog,” after a biblical intimation of evil (“Deliver my soul from the sword; my love from the power of the dog,” Psalms 22:20), it only hinted at the magnitude and ferocity of what was to come. That opening novel now looks like the series’ relatively innocent prologue — and it is as blade-sharp, violent, pulse-quickening and reportorially shocking as the pinnacle of some lesser series might be.

“The Power of the Dog” is, in brief, about the first decades that bind the destinies of Art Keller, a Vietnam veteran and later DEA agent, and Adán Barrera, a young Mexican who will go on to achieve the most dizzying heights of power. The book begins in a burning Mexican poppy field in 1975 (“Only in hell, Art Keller thinks, do flowers bloom fire”) and leaves Keller among more poppies in 2004. Many unspeakable acts happen in between, melding the personal with the political (Iran-Contra). It is all rendered unputdownable by Winslow’s unrivaled skill at his game.

The second book, “The Cartel” (2015), remains the heart of this series, and not only because of its central chronological position. It cements the ambition and the “Godfather” caliber of this whole multigenerational undertaking, and finds the major figures at their most fully formed. Some of it takes place, as we now learn with hindsight, in what were practically idyllic times for the Sinaloa cartel, a real-life cartel run by the fictional Barrera, regardless of his situation vis-à-vis imprisonment. Inside or out, he called the shots — and shots were the most merciful form of punishment meted out to this group’s vicious enemies. As the Sinaloa operation devolved into monstrous war with rivals, counting journalists among its many casualties, mere brutality became a distant memory.

A surprising array of characters from the earlier books reappears in “The Border.” One of them is a young boy who, in “The Cartel,” was seen kicking around a very bizarre soccer ball (an image readers of that book will never forget, no matter how hard they try). Keller and his new wife, Marisol Cisneros, the onetime mayor of Juarez, decide to try to help him.

It is 2012 when “The Border” starts, smoke still rising from the colossal battle that dethroned Barrera for good. A major plot point is the internecine horror that descends after the kingpin’s demise. The fight for succession lasts through the entire length of the novel.

Winslow means to journey deep into a new kind of hell this time, and to suggest that his readers recognize the sensation. This is a book for dark, rudderless times, an immersion into fear and chaos. It conjures more lawlessness, dishonesty, conniving, brutality and power mania than both of the earlier books put together.

Because of that chaos, it might have benefited from an indexed cast of characters. But Winslow can’t provide one. For one thing, it would be a spoiler. You just have to watch these miscreants as they drop. The Barrera heirs, would-be successors and arriviste rivals — a whole indulgent younger generation named Los Hijos, characterized by wretched excess and suicidal stupidity — make for countless shifting allegiances, fake names, dispensable henchmen and other complications.

Along with the battle to succeed Barrera, the plot involves Keller’s becoming head of the DEA despite his strong distrust of the federal government and its approach to solving America’s drug problems. In order to do that, Keller sets himself up as a kind of independent investigator, which has a current resonance, too. The book makes Winslow’s clear case for why everything we’re told about Mexican drug imports is wrong: why New York is so vital to the country’s illegal-drug distribution, and even production; how Wall Street money and drug money are intertwined; and how money laundering intersects with businesses like real estate.

Enter Jason Lerner, a very Jared Kushner-like character, and his father-in-law, John Dennison. Dennison has Donald Trump’s history, speaks Trump’s own words and has a name that combines two sobriquets (John Barron and David Dennison) that Trump once used while pretending to be his own spokesman.

Winslow describes sting operations with immersive, heart-grabbing intensity. You don’t read these books; you live in them. You come to learn all about what it means for a good cop to go undercover as a bad one; for a black ex-con to be coaxed into the world of high-stakes New York drug dealing because he can reach a market Mexicans can’t; for a Staten Island addict to fall helpless prey to the drug trade’s latest bright idea (a near-lethal burst of fentanyl added to the usual heroin). Each story is personal. But each has huge ramifications in Winslow’s larger scheme.

The single most wrenching subplot involves a 10-year-old Guatemalan boy whose life is all but over, thanks to a system of graft that makes prostitutes out of women and thugs out of men. The boy is not described cheerlessly; Winslow doesn’t write in that register. The child is amazingly hardy. But the book shows the single day, the single stroke of fate, that may determine his entire future if the systemic corruption that pervades “The Border” has its way.

About making prostitutes out of women: Let’s just say that Winslow didn’t invent the horrors of the drug world, and assume he’s presenting a version of what he’s seen and heard about them. The words used around gender and race in this book are frequently ugly, and in these times that calls for a warning.

Last and never least with Winslow: the matter of languages. He is fluent in many of them, and “The Border” once again shows off those talents. There’s slang, of course. Why have a snitch sing when he can be “doing his best Freddie Mercury imitation for DEA right now”? There is cop. There is politician, hit man, high roller. There is psycho — always a favorite, and always handy in the circles in which these books have traveled. "We’re soul mates,” one character says to another. “In the sense that neither of us has one.”

The border ends with another idea about the soul. “There is no wall that divides the human soul between its best impulses and its worst.” Two classic trilogies, “The Godfather” and now this one, are built upon it.

720 pages. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $28.99.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c0cff413-9f8f-4b9f-92e6-cd76a7bc509d" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/books/review-border-don-winslow.html">The New York Times</a>.

'The Border' is a stunning and timely conclusion to Don Winslow's drug-war trilogy

The book’s title, “The Border,” refers to both physical and moral barriers. Winslow is well aware that both that and its cover image, which depicts a razor-wire-topped wall spreading across a desert landscape, are politically loaded.

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Janet Maslin

Articles written by the author

Jack Reacher Is Still Restless. But His Creator Has Settled Down.

A literary detective returns to find trouble in the country club set

In the sequel to 'The Expats,' a spy stumbles

'The Border' is a stunning and timely conclusion to Don Winslow's drug-war trilogy