The Visitor by Lee Child (Jack Reacher #4)

Originally published 2000 by Bantam Press; this edition 2001

Publisher: Bantam Books

MA15+

(V, S, L, D, N)

Violence

Sexual References

Frequent Coarse Language

Drug Use

Nudity

Representations

Gender:

Tight third-person coupled to the male protagonist, occasional anonymised interludes featuring antagonist-candidates. The novel makes a point of establishing the protagonist's feminist credentials by primarily believing women who filed sexual harassment complaints in the US army.

Sex:

Only heterosexual sexuality represented. Sexual tension and attraction is a strong thread.

Race & Ethnicity:

All characters white US citizens that I was aware of, except a couple of incidental characters each of Syrian and Chinese origin.

Disability, Physical Diversity and Health:

One character is described as having a physical disability. Several characters among the killer's prospective victims are represented as having been traumatised by sexual harassment and rape.

Awards

Barry Award: Nominee

Borrowed this book from my mother's collection, I believe I am its first reader. This along with the previous two novels I read would be the one that started me on my current spy / mystery fiction kick. I quite enjoyed it, despite The Visitor also featuring snippet perspectives from the killer being hunted.

On the one hand, it is a bit frustrating to be several hundred pages ahead of the protagonist on matters like the means of murder (point of order: in real life it wouldn't work, but as a fictional trope, very recognisable), but I suppose I must also give credit to Lee Child for playing fair enough with the facts and what we are shown for this to be doable. I could say it is just because the whole thing smelled a lot like The Poet by Michael Connelly, down to (effectively) the same person being the killer, but I've read two more Jack Reacher novels since then and in all three my gut feelings have been substantially correct tens to hundreds of pages ahead of the characters.

It weirds me out. I've read plenty of mysteries in the past and almost never do I know what's going on before the detective lays it out. I suppose it comes of these leaning more into the realm of thrillers than mysteries?

I don't actually count this against the book, in the sense that I still enjoyed it a great deal, and was quite happy to read all the others in the series that I had to hand.