‘True randomness is impossible for a human to achieve. There are always patterns.’ (p.382)
The plot
James Barr, a soldier Reacher knew from back his army days, is conclusively proven to have parked in a multi-story car park in an unnamed city in Indiana, waited for rush hour workers to leave their offices at 5pm, and then calmly executed five of them using a long-range sniper rifle, packed up and driven home, where he is tracked down and arrested by the police a few hours later.
Call Reacher He refuses to say anything to the investigators except, ‘You’ve got the wrong guy’ and ‘Get Jack Reacher’. In fact, Reacher has already seen the story of the massacre on TV news in a bar and, as soon as he hears the culprit’s name, catches a sequence of buses to the (unnamed) city in Indiana (buses because Jack has no ID, therefore can’t hire cars).
Dramatis personae Here he encounters the cluster of characters surrounding the killer:
- Barr’s sister, Rosemary, who is convinced her brother is innocent
- Barr’s lawyer, Helen Rodin, who happens to be the daughter of the city’s district attorney, who will be defending Barr
- the cop who led the successful investigation, Emerson
- the city’s District Attorney, Alex Rodin, descendant of Russian immigrants (p.36), who only likes to prosecute cases which are 100% slam dunks
- Bellantonio, the thin, tall, dry forensic scientist who’s assembled a battery of irrefutable evidence
- Ann Yanni, the ambitious local NBC news reporter, who Reacher takes an instant dislike to but who he recruits to the cause with the promise of a scoop
- as it happens, Rosemary Barr, the killer’s sister, works for a law firm and they take pity on her for being associated with her mass murder brother and so commission their regular investigator, Franklin, to look into the case. Later, he is hired by Ann Yanni, who has a much bigger budget, and turns up some useful leads.
There are several strands to the plot.
Kuwait Helen and Rosemary hope Reacher has come to somehow vindicate and save Barr. But it’s the opposite. Reacher was the military policeman who assembled the conclusive evidence that Barr, after years of training as an Army sniper in the late 1980s, and after being forced to sit out Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991 (because it was mostly an armoured and artillery war) snaps, holed up in a car park in Kuwait City, and shot dead four civilians emerging from a house.
The Kuwait coverup The four victims turn out to be American soldiers so you’d have thought Barr would be court martialled and banged away for life. But the investigation uncovered that the four had themselves been gruesome thugs, raping and looting their way across Kuwait City. Any trial of Barr would have inevitably brought this to light with terrible consequences for the reputation of the U.S. Army and the Allied Coalition. Therefore, to Reacher’s intense disgust, the case was suppressed and Barr was given an honourable discharge from the army.
He called for Reacher because a) he had made Reacher a promise to go straight but b), it slowly dawns on Reacher that it was a subtle call for help. Because Barr had seen, at first hand, during the Kuwait investigation, what a meticulous investigator Reacher had been and hopes that, once again, he will be able to use his forensic skills and meticulous logical approach to revealing the real killers…
The Russians The reader is ahead of Reacher because Child, from quite early on, alternates the Reacher sections of narrative, with the parallel thoughts and activities of a group of Russian criminals.
These guys are really hard. Their leader, the Zec, is eighty years old, has lost most of the fingers on both hands, and has lived through extraordinary suffering which is only fleetingly referred to – surviving appalling suffering in the gulag, and through the Second World War. ‘Zec’ is, in fact, Russian slang which simply means gulag prisoner (p.383). We are told that the Zec chewed some of his own fingers off rather than succumb to frostbite and then gangrene in the camp. All his ‘men’ are terrified of him.
His number two is Grigor Linski who, among other experiences he suffered in a similar Russian background, at one point had every one of his vertebrae systematically smashed with a hammer, surviving, but with a telltale limp and stoop (p.219).
The Zec and Grigor have some younger muscle to help, Chenko and the big goon Vladimir. When a sidekick, Raskin, screws up tailing Reacher, he is ordered by the Zec to commit suicide, digs his own grave and shoots himself in the mouth. That’s the kind of terrifying grip the Zec exerts.
The sports bar brawl It slowly becomes clear that these are the guys who somehow got Barr to commit the shooting spree. Reacher speculates that they threatened to hurt or kill Barr’s sister, the only person in the sad loner’s life. 250 pages in we still don’t know for sure whether this is the case or why they sponsored such a high level incident. Instead, we read through an atmosphere heavy with brooding threat. This is given physical form when the Russians commission a pack of redneck toughs to beat Reacher up in a sports bar. Bad idea. Reacher applies his Nine Rules of Barroom Fighting and pulps the first three, whereupon the last two run away.
Sandy More sickeningly, they’d used a local dolly bird named Sandy (real name, Alexandra Dupree) to chat Reacher up in the bar, then leap up and scream that he’d called her a ‘whore’. That was the prompt for the men to come over and ‘protect her honour’. The bar-room fight tactic fails, but the Russians need to stop Reacher snooping around, so a few days later they pick up the girl and kill her outside Reacher’s hotel, hoping to make it look like he eventually slept with her, but they argued for some reason.
The DA goes for Reacher Now the prosecuting attorney, Rodin, knows all about Reacher, met him in some of the meetings the lawyers have had about the Barr case, and has become fixated on the idea that Reacher is influencing his daughter’s handling of Barr’s defence. In a nutshell, Reacher is holding out hope that Barr might be innocent or there might be extenuating circumstances (which is indeed what Reacher increasingly believes). So when the police find the dead girl’s body and quickly establish a connection between her and Reacher in the brawl at the bar, Rodin is delighted, and tells detective Emerson to put out an all points bulletin to have Reacher arrested. From this point Reacher is on the run, and has to communicate with Helen, Rosemary and Ann from payphones in the dark, or at secret rendezvous. All undercover, on the run, fleeing as the cop car sirens come closer.
If you combine it with the brief scenes we have where Grigor and his men are closing in on Reacher, the whole setup makes for a very tense and dramatic read.
Complications
Barr beaten In the prison where Barr is remanded he is foolish enough to disrespect an extremely fierce Mexican crim, who shows up later with a pack of sidekicks and beats Barr to a pulp. He survives, is put in hospital, initially in a coma but, when he regains consciousness – has amnesia and can’t remember anything about the events of the last few weeks. He is genuinely heart-broken to learn that he shot those people. He has no idea why. A neurologist and psychiatrist test him and both agree it is genuine amnesia. Damn. There goes the main way of finding out what the hell happened.
An old flame Reacher foolishly let slip mention of the Pentagon to the investigator Rodin, who makes enquiries and has the officer in charge of the investigation, Eileen Hutton, subpoenaed to be interviewed. Now Reacher and Hutton had a passionate three-month affair in Kuwait back in the day (1991). They both got posted in different directions. He wonders if she’s changed and gets his hair cut and a close shave specially to meet her.
Love interest Hutton turns up, now an impressive Brigadier-General (p.262), but still hot and sexy like the best Reacher babes are.
- When called to be formally interviewed by Rodin, she stonewalls him, denying Barr has any previous form for something like this shooting.
- She and Reacher have already hooked up (he goes to meet her) and soon he is hiding out in her hotel suite, making occasional forays out to investigate, and in between enjoying the kind of large-scale, bed-shattering sex which Reacher specialises in.
Questions Was it the Russians who blackmailed Barr into carrying out the killing? Why? Why did they want it to be a copycat of his Kuwait City killing spree? Will Reacher discover their existence and role in the plot before they contrive to have him arrested or bumped off? What lies behind the whole plot, what are they up to? Is the secret in the background of Barr the killer? Or is it something to do with one of the five murdered civilians? If so, which one?
And how many more times can Hutton and Reacher have wild, championship sex?
You’ll have to read the book to find the answers for yourself 🙂
One shot
The title has several different meanings. When Barr shot the five commuters down, he actually fired six shots. One of them he deliberately fired into an ornamental pond they were walking past, knowing the bullet would be slowed down and easily recovered by police forensics. But it was also a message to an expert like Reacher, the type of glitch or anomaly which recurs in all the books, a slight blip which sets our hero thinking: Why did a drop-dead ace sniper, firing from less than forty yards, miss one shot? What was he trying to say?
Then in the second half of the book, Reacher travels to a shooting range in Kentucky which he has discovered that Barr used to visit to practice at. The range is owned by a tough, blunt ex-Marine who refuses to answer any questions about Barr (who is, by this stage, has been all over the TV news and the papers). But Reacher notices an old target paper with five near bull’s eyes, the record of a Marine winning some shooting contest back in the day, and realises it’s a trophy of the old Marine. Reacher compliments him on his shooting. Mollified, the Marine gets out his own personal rifle and challenges Reacher to do as well. Gives him one bullet.
The implication is clear. Reacher has one shot. If he can match the Marine’s accuracy, the guy will talk, tell him the story, clear up the mystery.
One shot to unlock the truth. Will he succeed?
Well, it turns out that Reacher himself won the U.S. Marine Corps Thousand Yard Invitational Competition in 1988. Will he succeed? Hell yeah.
One shot? That’s all Jack Reacher ever needs!
How to sound American
1. Vocabulary
the air = air conditioning in a car or building e.g. ‘The air was set very cold and smelled of sharp chemical flavours’ (p.166)
black-and-white = police patrol car
blacktop = anything covered in asphalt e.g. a highway, parking lot, drive
boardwalk = a constructed pedestrian walkway, often alongside a beach
done deal = an irrevocable agreement
duct work = external pipes and ventilators
dumpster = big metal container for rubbish, a skip
hardscrabble = adjective denoting origins in hard work and poverty
heartland = term for the U.S. states which don’t touch water, denotes down-home, traditional values
in back = at the back of something, especially a building
a laugher = a sporting match or competition which is so easily won by one team or competitor that it seems absurd
a lube shop = garage which specialises in changing the oil and checking lubrication of all moving parts on a car
mirandise = to read a suspect their Miranda rights i.e. ‘you have the right to remain silent…’
porch glider = a type of rocking chair that moves as a swing seat, where the entire frame consists of a seat attached to the base by means of a double-rocker four-bar linkage
prowl car = police patrol car
sidewalk = pavement
slam dunk = a type of basketball shot that is performed when a player jumps in the air, controls the ball above the horizontal plane of the rim, and scores by putting the ball directly through the basket with one or both hands; used to mean a dead certainty
squared away = American military term meaning above satisfactory level for a sustained period: good, neat, tidy, trim
a turnout = the triangular shaped junction of a country road with a bigger road
window reveal = recess surrounding a window, of which the bottom forms the ledge, on which people often set items like vases or books
2. Know your weapons
Americans love guns. Not necessarily all Americans, just enough to provide a steady supply of mass shootings. And, after all, this novel is about a mass shooter.
Here’s Child’s description of the weapon which James Barr uses to execute the five rush-hour commuters.
It was a Springfield M1A Super Match autoloader, American walnut stock, heavy premium barrel, ten shot box magazine, chambered for the .308. It was the exact commercial equivalent of the M14 self-loading sniper rifle that the American military had used during his long-ago years in the service. It was a fine weapon. Maybe not quite as accurate as a top-of-the-line bolt gun, but it would do. It would do just fine…. It was loaded with Lake City M852s. His favourite custom cartridges. Special Lake City Match brass, Federal powder, Sierra Matchking 168-grain hollow point boat tail bullets. The load was better than the gun, probably. (p.14)
This is the gun which ex-Marine sergeant Cash offers Reacher to test how well the latter can shoot on his firing range.
It was a Remington M24, with a Leopold Ultra scope and a front bipod. A standard-issue Marine sniper’s weapon. It looked to be well used but in excellent condition…
‘One shot,’ said Cash. He took a single cartridge from his pocket. Held it up. It was a .300 Winchester round. Match grade. (p.344)
And at the climax of the book, Reacher faces off with the Russian shooter, Chenko, who is armed with a sawn-off shotgun.
It had been a Benelli Nova Pump. The stock had been cut off behind the pistol grip. The barrel had been hacked off behind the pistol grip. The barrel had been hacked off ahead of the slide. Twelve-gauge. Four-shot magazine. A handsome weapon, butchered. (p.492)
Child has obviously done a lot of research into modern weaponry.
A man’s world
Reacher operates in the world of the police and army, against violent criminals. It is an unremittingly violent and generally very male world.
Intelligent women exist in it – lawyers, pilots, cops – in fact, Child takes a small but noticeable pleasure in upsetting sexist expectations and mentioning minor characters like a pilot or a lawyer or a doctor, letting you assume they’re men – and then revealing that they’re women (like Dr McBannerman in Tripwire, who Child assumes to be a grizzled old Scotsman but turns out to be a trim, professional woman doctor).
But the women are all, by definition, smaller and weaker than Reacher (everyone is smaller and weaker than Reacher) so he always ends up defending them.
Examples of hyper-violence include:
- the sniper shooting five civilians, which kick starts the plot
- the sniper, James Barr, is then beaten and stabbed in prison by an extremely hard Mexican gang
- we hear a retrospective account of Barr’s shooting of four unarmed men in Kuwait City
- five rednecks, led by Jeb Oliver, take on Reacher in a bar fight
- the Russians murder Jeb Oliver, cut off his hands and head and bury the body parts in different places
- the Russians murder Sandy the dolly bird by getting big Vladimir to punch her once on the side of the head
- the finale in which Reacher:
- stabs one Russian in the neck
- bear hugs another to death
- throws Chenko out a third floor window
Jokes
Reacher has a rare but nice way with ironic asides.
‘You know much about head injuries?’
‘Only the ones I cause.’ (p.113)
‘You’re new in town,’ she said.
‘Usually,’ he said. (p.128)
‘I know who you are,’ she said.
‘So do I,’ he said. (p.326)
Reacher’s diet
For breakfast Reacher has the full monty, always including fried eggs and black coffee. For lunch and dinner, cheeseburgers and onion rings, washed down by beer. For another breakfast a ham and egg muffin followed by two slices of lemon pie (p.234). For lunch, a grilled cheese sandwich (p.254). Later, a big sirloin steak in Hutton’s hotel room.
How does he keep in any kind of shape?
Jack Reacher’s rules for bar fighting
Rule one – Be on your feet and ready
Rule two – Show them what they’re messing with
Rule three – Identify the ringleader
Rule four – The ringleader is the one who moves first
Rule five – Never back off
Rule six – Don’t break the furniture
Rule seven – Act, don’t react
Rule eight – Assess and evaluate
Rule nine – Don’t run head-on into Jack Reacher (pp.129-132)
Intelligent, thoughtful, hyper-violent, gun-crazy fun. Find a pool, find a lounger, turn off your phone and enjoy!
Credit
One Shot by Lee Child was published in 2005 by Bantam Press. All quotes are from the 2012 film tie-in edition.
Books & Boots 