Jack Reacher, the hero of ten or so Lee Child thrillers to date, is your average tough guy: six-foot-five, hard as nails, a crack shot, and as deadly with his hands as he is with a gun. He's ex-military . . . but not the special-forces type that usually turns up in this kind of story. He was an investigator with the military police, and he's ferociously smart in the classic cop fashion: he notices things about the world around him, including the people who inhabit it, and puts them together faster than anyone else in the room. Jack Reacher is what you'd get if tried to invent a character with Spenser's physicality, Lieutenant Columbo's brain, and Travis McGee's off-the-grid lifestyle. He's too good to be true, but big deal . . . he's great fun to read about.

Child is in his usual good form in this second installment of the series, combining action, suspense, and a bit of character development in agreeable proportions. He writes well on a sentence-to-sentence level, and the plot zips along nicely. Reacher intervenes in the attempted kidnapping of a woman on a busy Chicago street, and is taken by the kidnappers as well. He and the woman bond (in refreshingly novel and convincing ways) and he becomes determined to save her as well as himself. Just how hard this is going to be becomes slowly apparent as Child reveals (to Reacher and the reader) just who the intended kidnap victim is and why she's been taken. The climax of the book has Reacher (and others) trying to stop not just a kidnapping but a Gigantic Evil Plot by a Crazed Megalomaniac. There, alas, lies the book's principal drawback.

Reacher is fascinating when he has the opportunity to think as well as use his considerable skills at violence and mayhem, and when his connection with the Bad Guys and their Would-Be Victims is individual and personal. When he's pitted against a Gigantic Evil Plot, those opportunities diminish. He becomes a typical thriller hero: running, jumping, shooting, and hanging from helicopters. It's entertaining, but not *as* entertaining as watching him out-think as well as out-shoot and out-fight the Bad Guys. Most of the last third of "Die Trying" is Reacher vs. the Gigantic Evil Plot, and while it's handled competently it means that the book becomes more pedestrian and less interesting as it moves toward its climax. Tellingly, the best scenes *in* the latter part of the book involve Reacher and in contests more psychological than physical: against the head Bad Guy, against a minion who's guarding him, and against his own fear of enclosed spaces.

Thrillers about Gigantic Evil Plots always run the risk of tipping over the line into implausibility, but some thriller writers handle it better than others. Robert Ludlum was brilliant at it, Tom Clancy used to be, and Dale Brown has never been. Child is adequate, but only that. He's a good enough writer that you suspend your disbelief, but the Gigantic Evil Plot has more loose ends and implausible mechanisms showing than it should. The technical details of the Evil Deed that's supposed to be its climax make it, to my non-expert eyes, far more difficult to execute than it ought to be.

All that said, "Die Trying" was a satisfying thriller and (in its assured writing and terse dialogue) several steps ahead of most of what's out there these days. It was disappointing only to the extent that Lee Child can do (and has done) better by his unique hero.