Make Me by Lee Child - review

This time we're in Oklahoma where Jack Reacher just cain't say no to a damsel in distress, specifically former FBI agent Michelle Chang, who is searching for a missing colleague last seen in the mysteriously named burg of Mother's Rest.

The first page reveals that the investigator has already been laid to rest in a hogpen "in the middle of ten-thousand acres of nothingness". It seems the dead man had learned something he shouldn't. The creepy locals, of course, are not forthcoming — yet it takes 70 pages before our hero lays a foot on them: "Reacher stepped back, and then he checked on the first guy, who was preoccupied, like most guys he had kicked in the groin."

This is the 20th instalment of Lee Child's American odyssey. He has earned the right to play with our expectations and does so with glee. The deadly secret — something to do with GM crops, perhaps? — leads Reacher and Chang to Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago and San Francisco, hunted all the while by some scary Ukrainians. Remember Little Joey, the Essex gangster in Personal, whose head was "bigger than a basketball"? Here the Mr Big, who owns a nightclub called Pink, is "an undifferentiated triangle of flesh, with breasts the size of soft basketballs".

The final destination, discovered via the Deep Web, naturally lies back in Oklahoma, where the intrepid duo, now lovers, find something very nasty in a workshed. Never has the phrase "too much information" been more apt.

Still, the chase is the thing and Child ensures, after the slow build-up, that it is both breathless and bloody: "Twenty feet behind the guy's head the wall instantly cratered, the size of a punch bowl, and a ghastly split-second later the contents of the guy's brain pan arrived to fill it with a wet slap, all red and grey and purple."

You can't help lapping it up — even if it does leave a bad taste in the mouth.

(Bantam Press, £20)

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