Nothing to Lose - Lee Child

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Nothing to Lose

by
Lee Child

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Nothing to Lose
Author:	Lee Child
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2008
Length:	531 pages
Availability:	Nothing to Lose - US
	Nothing to Lose - UK
	Nothing to Lose - Canada
	L'espoir fait vivre - France
	Outlaw - Deutschland
	Niente da perdere - Italia
	Nada que perder - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

The tweflth Jack Reacher novel

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Our Assessment:

B+ : everything here a bit obvious and simple (beginning with the names of the locales), but a solid thriller

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Financial Times	.	22/3/2008	James Urquhart
The Guardian	.	29/3/2008	Martin Lewin
The Independent	.	2/4/2008	Andy Martin
The NY Times	.	2/6/2008	Janet Maslin
The Observer	A	6/4/2008	Peter Guttridge
The Times	.	12/4/2008	Peter Millar

From the Reviews:

"Nothing to Lose slots a series of bone-crunching brawls into a surprisingly sinuous and zeitgeisty plot that rises above the crude machismo of its opening. There's little subtlety in Child's 12th outing for "one-man crime wave" Reacher but Vaughan, Hope's sad-eyed policewoman, delivers emotional depth, and Reacher's bare-knuckle sleuthing certainly keeps the adrenalin up." - James Urquhart, Financial Times

"But when it comes down to it, I find Reacher insufferably smug and unbelievable in all his certainty and invulnerability. And besides, despite the brawling and exertion and scrabbling through the desert, he doesn't change his pants for weeks on end." - Martin Lewin, The Guardian

"There is a hint of Bob Dylan and Easy Rider in the way he drifts from town to town, kicking over stones with crime, corruption, and cold-hearted killing beneath them. In this latest adventure, he runs up against a born-again businessman impatient for apocalypse, and some very toxic side effects of war in the Middle East. Child's women, who find Reacher and his scars irresistible, are almost as tough and appealingly existential as he is." - Andy Martin, The Independent

"Nothing to Lose is Mr. Child’s steepest feat of escalation thus far. It’s also the Reacher book most likely to require geometric sketches scribbled in margins. (...) One way that Mr. Child amplifies Nothing to Lose is via physical scale. (...) These elements work amazingly well in Nothing to Lose, but the author ought not press his luck. His plotting can’t get much more ambitious without leaving credibility and sanity behind." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"(A) high-testosterone adventure with a thoughtful nod to what is going on in Iraq. Child's 12th novel is intelligent but the author never forgets that he's writing a page-turner. Thrilling." - Peter Guttridge, The Observer

"An unusually political novel, this is as gripping and readable as any in the Reacher series. My one problem with it is Reacher, the all-American action-man hero who allegedly inspires envy in male readers and lust in females. Unfortunately I find him a socially dysfunctional, second-rate Superman addicted to burgers and coffee and without the vulnerabilities posed by Lois Lane and kryptonite." - Peter Millar, The Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

Nothing to Lose finds Jack Reacher -- Lee Child's indefatigable lone warrior -- in Colorado. As always, he's traveling very light -- with little more than his toothbrush --; arguably, he's just a vagrant -- though he doesn't think that's the fitting description. Indeed, that's what they argue about early on, when he's brought up on that charge:

     "I'm not a vagrant."
     "Homeless for ten years, jobless for ten years, you ride buses or beg rides or walk from place to place performing occasional casual labor, what else would you call yourself ?"
     "Free," Reacher said. "And lucky."

Reacher is first seen here crossing from Hope to Despair -- yes, those are what the two neighboring towns in which almost all the action takes place are called -- and, as might be expected from such a crossing -- who wants to go from hope to despair ? -- he's soon mired in all sorts of messes.
Despair is a strange kind of town. It's a company-town, dominated by the local large-scale recycling business owned by Bible-thumping Mr. Thurman, who controls every aspect of the town. Thurman is "pink and plump and prosperous", but the locals don't seem to be doing quite so well (including health-wise). Thurman believes the end of times are nigh -- helpfully suggesting to Reacher:

You should think about getting your life in order, you know, before it's too late. Something might happen. The Book of Revelation says, the time is at hand.

Though a pretty calm and collected old coot, Thurman is, unsurprisingly, also a fanatic, eager to nudge things along, Book of Revelation-wise -- though it takes Reacher a while to figure out exactly what Thurman is up to.
Despair holds quite a few mysteries; it's also just plain weird. It's not a hospitable place, that's for sure: as Reacher quickly learns, strangers are not wanted. As he eventually jokes:

That should be your town motto. It's all I ever hear. Like New Hampshire, live free or die. It should be Despair, you need to leave now.

Reacher doesn't like to be told what to do, and his curiosity is piqued. He gets kicked out of Despair -- repeatedly -- and they make clear to him that he's unwelcome, but he keeps coming back. (Among the odd tics of the Reacher novels is that Reacher travels so much in them, flying and driving huge distances, often just for very brief visits; here he barely makes it beyond these two towns (though Child does fly him a few hundred miles at one point, to add to his mileage) -- but he seems to be constantly going back and forth between them, on foot and by car.)
Reacher finds an ally in local law enforcement in Hope -- a female officer named Vaughan, "good-looking, but different from regular women. She had seen stuff they hadn't". He first meets her when she picks him up from the town line the first time he is kicked out of Despair. explaining:

     "The Despair PD calls us when they're dumping someone at the line. As a courtesy."
     "This happens a lot ?"
     "More than you'd think."

       Indeed. But those in Despair seem to just want to make sure the outsiders are gone; even when Reacher comes to blows with some (and then pretty much all, because of course he does) the local deputies they don't really pursue the matters; the only thing that matters is keeping the outsiders out. (Hell, eventually Reacher burns their police station down, but even that doesn't really change their focus.) It puzzles him, but it's clear to him that: "All they ever want to do is keep people out of there. They're not interested in the law or justice or punishment".
       The war in Iraq casts some shadows in the story, from how it's upended Vaughan's life (though her situation makes her a perfect fit for a Reacher-relationship -- some rolling in the hay, but all with the knowledge that it's just a fling and that Reacher will soon be on his way out of her life) to aspects of the recycling business -- yes, Thurman gets lots of his raw material from there (which is also why he pursues a strange kind of hobby that involves him flying out of town late at night nearly every day, in one of the novel's odd little side-stories).
       Reacher gets into the requisite fights along the way as he sniffs around, always outnumbered, pretty much always emerging victorious. As he mentions along the way -- though, really, he could be making the observation constantly --: "They're messing with the wrong guy" (and it always takes them ages to learn ...).
       While there's the odd hulking goon or two, Child shows some remarkable restraint with the bad guys here -- so also, in particular, with Thurman, who isn't your cartoon megalomaniac mastermind (though he is nuts -- though mainly religiously nuts). He is a pretty hard-nosed capitalist businessman, especially the way he runs his business and the town (showing some appalling indifference to the well-being of his employees and the townsfolk in general), but he repeatedly tries to convince Reacher, almost politely, to mind his own business and just leave him to his. He's shrewd, rather than brutally-evil like so many of the powerful men Reacher usually deals with -- a welcome change (and don't worry, he too gets his -- in spades).
       There's an appealing feel of slight aimlessness for much of the novel, too, as Reacher struggles to figure out what is going (because several things are going on, and it's not clear that they are related) -- and keeps diving into, and then leaving Despair. As he nicely sums up, well into the story:

There are three things going on over there. The military contract, plus something else, plus something else again.

       The ending is pretty ridiculously over the top, but the confrontation building up to the ... um, explosive high-point is nicely low-key, with little physical fighting (or shooting, etc. etc.); the whole thing is one of the better resolutions among the Reacher-novels. Child also handles the ... um, fall-out from the finale nicely -- not letting it be the big deal it would be in real life, but rather having it be efficiently handled and basically, in all respects, covered up; here: "The Pentagon had begun to stonewall even before the last fragments had cooled".
       Reacher is too even-keeled to lurch back and forth between feelings of hope and despair; there are others here to do that (notably some young women looking to meet up with their husbands and boyfriends), but his back and forth between the two towns -- along with assorted brief side- and (a)round-trips -- is quite entertaining. There's a lot of story packed in here, too, but Child doesn't over-do any of it too much, even the silly main plot Reacher uncovers (and, of course, neutralizes) at the end.
       All in all, one of the better Reacher-novels.

- M.A.Orthofer, 2 October 2026

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Links:

Nothing to Lose:

Dell publicity page
Bantam publicity page
Points publicity page
Blanvalet Taschenbuch Verlag publicity page
TEA publicity page

Reviews:

Lee Child:

Official site
How Jack Reacher Was Built by John Lanchester

Other books by Lee Child under review:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
See Index of Contemporary British fiction
See Index of Series and Sequels under review

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About the Author:

British author Lee Child was born in 1954.

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