Put thrills into your summer reading

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By Vick Mickunas, Contributing Writer 9:33 PM Saturday, June 20, 2009

“Gone Tomorrow” by Lee Child, (Delacorte Press, 421 pages, $27).

“The Neighbor” by Lisa Gardner, (Bantam, 373 pages, $25).

This sultry June weather puts me in the mood to read a thriller or two. Lucky thing then that a pair of sizzling new thrillers just hit the book bins.

Lee Child just came out with his 13th Jack Reacher novel, “Gone Tomorrow.” This one opens with Reacher riding a New York subway car late at night. There are only a few passengers riding along with him. One passenger, a woman, attracts his notice.

She exhibits the warning signs of being a potential suicide bomber. Reacher goes down the list in his head of the 12 supposedly certain indicators identified by Israeli counterintelligence as obvious ways to identify individuals planning to detonate explosives. She meets all the criteria.

Reacher is a former military policeman who methodically evaluates his options for preventing her from blowing up the train. Lee Child ratchets up the tension from the very first page of “Gone Tomorrow.”

Child was a successful longtime director at a British television network when he lost his job in a corporate downsizing in 1995. He thought he would give fiction writing a try. He concocted the character of Jack Reacher, a crime fighter who wanders America with just a toothbrush, an ATM card, an expired passport and the clothes on his back.

Reacher seeks out quality cups of coffee while he hunts down bad guys with lethal precision. Criminals aren’t the only ones who fall victim to him. He’s also a ladykiller. The formula works. “Gone Tomorrow” and the previous book, “Nothing to Lose,” each debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Child’s books have sold more than 22 million copies.

Lisa Gardner began her writing career as a romance novelist. Then she shifted gears and began writing romantic suspense. Now she writes thrillers with slight tinges of romance. Her latest novel, “The Neighbor,” is a page turner with an incredibly convoluted plot.

It begins as a beautiful young schoolteacher, Sandy Jones, vanishes from her Boston home in the middle of the night.

Her husband, Jason, a newspaper reporter, comes home from work early in the morning to find their 4-year-old daughter alone and his wife missing.

Of course the husband becomes the No. 1 suspect. Gardner provides readers with other suspicious characters, too. The female detective assigned to the case wants it resolved quickly.

That doesn’t happen — 300 pages into “The Neighbor” she’s clearly frustrated. “Look at our pool of suspects: We have the mysterious husband who’s probably engaged in online porn, the down-the-street neighbor who’s a registered sex offender, a 13-year-old student who’s in love with his missing teacher, a state computer technician who seems to have a very personal stake in the investigation, and, last but not least, the victim’s estranged father who may or may not have known she was abused as a child and has lots of incentive to keep that quiet.”

Gardner has almost 13 million books in print. She visits Books and Co. at The Greene in Beavercreek at 7 p.m. Monday, June 22.

Contact book reviewer Vick Mickunas at vick@vickmickunas.com.

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