Nothing to Lose (novel)

Nothing to Lose is the twelfth book in the Jack Reacher series written by Lee Child. It was published in the UK by Bantam Press in March 2008 and in the US by Delacorte in June 2008. It is written in the third person.

Nothing To Lose
2008 Hardcover edition
AuthorLee Child
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
SeriesJack Reacher
GenreThriller novel
PublisherBantam Press (UK), Delacorte Press (US)
Publication date
24 March 2008
Media typePrint (hardcover)
Pages426
ISBN0-593-05702-3
OCLC176649008
Preceded byBad Luck and Trouble 
Followed byGone Tomorrow 

Plot summary

As described by Sherryl Connelly of the New York Daily News,[1]

In Child's 12th Reacher novel, "Nothing to Lose," our man has decided to walk across the country diagonally from Maine to California. It's a stroll until he hits Despair, where he's run out of town for just showing up.

The cops drop him at the neighboring town line, Hope. There, a really quite friendly deputy picks him up in a cruiser and they bond, first in trying to find out what kind of hell Despair is in, and then otherwise.

It's a one-man town. Everything, including the excessively profitable metal recycling plant, is owned by a crazed evangelist. But then there's the inexplicably located high-grade military base a couple miles beyond. Despair has more than one secret and won't give them up easily. That makes Reacher mad.

The guy's money when it comes to personally engineered max destruction for the right reasons. The folks in Despair have everything to fear, and nothing to hope for when Reacher comes to town. They just don't know that, until they do.

Similarities to First Blood

Nothing to Lose features several similarities to David Morrell's 1972 novel, First Blood, including the fact that the lead character (a former soldier) is mistaken for a loiterer and harassed by local law enforcement. The name of the town in both novels is "Hope" and the theme of corrupt and bullying authority is also shared.

Morrell's novel was popular in its time and was the inspiration for the hugely successful 1982 film First Blood starring Sylvester Stallone, released to international acclaim.

Style

Andy Martin of The Independent described the writing of the main character to be like "the great Philip Marlowe pulp tradition, nuanced with a dash of Rambo and Bruce Willis."[2]

Critical reception

Peter Millar of The Sunday Times found the novel to be "as gripping and readable as any in the Reacher series", though he considered the main character to be a "socially dysfunctional, second-rate Superman".[3] Henry Sutton in The Daily Mirror wrote that the novel is another example of Child's "brilliantly paced plots".[4]

gollark: > I never tried it. It's nice that it has these safety features but I prefer C++ still. > If I want to be sure that my program is free of bugs, I can write a formal specification and do a > correctness proof with the hoare calculus in some theorem proofer (People did that for the seL4 microkernel, which is free from bugs under some assumptions and used in satellites, nuclear power plants and such)Didn't doing that for seL4 require several hundred thousand lines of proof code?
gollark: Most countries have insanely convoluted tax law so I assume it's possible.
gollark: Hmm, so you need to obtain a hypercomputer of some sort to write your tax forms such that they cannot plausibly be checked?
gollark: What if it's somehow really easy to find *a* solution to something, but not specific ones, and hard to check the validity of a specific maybe-solution? Is that possible?
gollark: Er, maybe?

References
  1. Connelly, Sherryl (13 June 2008). "Trouble comes to town in Lee Child's new Jack Reacher novel". New York Daily News. Retrieved 20 October 2010.
  2. Martin, Andy (2 April 2008). "Nothing To Lose, by Lee Child". The Independent. Retrieved 20 October 2010.
  3. Millar, Peter (11 April 2008). "Nothing to Lose by Lee Child and Steel Witches by Patrick Lennon". The Sunday Times. Retrieved 20 October 2010.
  4. Sutton, Henry (20 March 2008). "Review: Nothing To Lose". Daily Mirror. Retrieved 20 October 2010.
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