Make Me

Make Me is the twentieth Jack Reacher novel from Lee Child, published in 2015. The book opens with Reacher stepping off a train in a small Midwestern town called Mother’s Rest, drawn by the unusual name and curious about what kind of place would call itself that. The town is mostly grain elevators and silos, the kind of small agricultural community that the long railroad lines pass through without stopping. Reacher meets Michelle Chang, a private investigator looking for a missing colleague, and the two of them begin a partnership that will take them across several states and through one of the more disturbing investigations in the entire Reacher series.

What distinguishes Make Me from many of the other Reacher novels is the slow building dread that Lee Child constructs across the early chapters. The reader, like Reacher and Chang, knows that something is very wrong in Mother’s Rest. The townspeople are unaccountably hostile. The missing investigator’s trail keeps disappearing. The connections to a wider operation that someone is going to extreme lengths to keep hidden begin to surface only piece by piece. When the actual nature of what is happening finally becomes clear, the revelation is one of the darkest in the series, and Lee Child handles the material with the kind of restraint that makes it hit harder than more graphic treatments would.

Reacher himself is the same Reacher he has always been. Six foot five, ex military police, no luggage, no permanent address, and a willingness to handle situations with whatever force the situation calls for. What makes the late series novels interesting is the way Child has been gradually putting Reacher into territory that requires him to confront not just individual villains but systemic horrors that cannot be solved with the kind of personal violence that resolves the smaller cases. Make Me is one of the books where this larger turn becomes most visible.

For longtime Reacher fans, Make Me is one of the strongest entries in the late series. For new readers, the book works as a standalone but rewards some prior familiarity with Reacher’s character and his methods. Lee Child’s prose discipline is on full display throughout, with the brisk pacing and the tight construction that has made the series one of the most successful thriller franchises of the past three decades.