Book review: Humanity at its best and worst

Famous for his Jack Reacher novels featuring the ex-military police officer turned investigator, leading thriller writer, Lee Child has now turned his hand to short stories. 

Set in the US, this clever collection of intricately plotted vignettes reveals humanity at its best and worst. 

Child knows the darkness that lies in the heart of a drug dealer, the ruthlessness of an assassin, and the survival instinct of an heiress who renders her new bodyguard useless — but saves his life.

In 'The Bodyguard', written in the first person, the narrator admits that his risk addiction drove his decisions. 

When he is interviewed for the role of bodyguard by a wealthy 22-year-old Brazilian woman, he “should have walked away”. 

The daughter of a businessman and politician, whose mother is a TV star, Anna is captivating. She does human rights work — and wants a life that includes retail therapy. 

The bodyguard tells her she’s a prime target. And sure enough, “it all went wrong with the shopping”. But despite being threatened by “at least forty thugs” Anna manages to outwit them. 

While the narrator says he was expendable, Anna was supposed to be used as leverage against her father to get a government inquiry stopped.

A hit man in 'The Greatest Trick of All' features Ryland who “moved in a world where a guy would be a thousand times happier to get a call from a cop than a divorce lawyer”. 

Ryland kills for money. And sometimes the opportunity to double the cash presents itself when a wife wants a hit on her husband once she discovers that he wants to bump her off. Like the previous story, a woman gets the upper hand in the end. 

Lee Child is an equal opportunities writer of stories that are chilling and employ much deviousness.

A double-crossing man in a bar does the dirt on a drug dealer when he unburdens his fears to him. Child is a master at deploying psychological manipulation in his fiction. 

He writes that the drug dealer (whom the man knows to see) was the sort of guy who would spill his guts once he assumes an intimacy that isn’t really there. 

The devious man even invokes method acting á la Marlon Brando to guide the drug dealer in his efforts to avoid being killed for stealing both money and drugs.

In the title story, the reader is presented with a scenario that involves a murder which appears to have been carried out by a beleaguered wife, tired of her husband’s abusive behaviour. But it’s not that straightforward.

However, the county District Attorney “loved the case to bits. To put a middle-class white woman away would prove his impartial even-handedness.”

Race again features in 'Public Transportation'. A 14-year-old girl is viciously murdered in her home while her prosperous parents are at a party. 

But counter-intuitively, a white frat boy who liked partying a little too much is blamed for the crime, posthumously, having died from heat exhaustion and dehydration. 

His toxicology report reveals a lot of ecstasy drugs and alcohol. He’s a handy proxy for the cops who wanted a quick result for the murder of the white teenager.

These stories are a kind of Tales of the Unexpected with the reader immersed in various scenarios before the sometimes surprising revelations are made. After a while, you’re trying to guess the endings.

There is no great depth to this fiction. Instead of the epiphanies that are usually associated with short stories, the reader instead is sucker-punched.

The stories are well-paced but some read more like plain reportage than an unfolding nuanced narrative. More ‘showing’ and less ‘telling’ would have helped.