I thought this was an excellent addition to the series. The parallel plots, of a young Canadian couple whose car is on its last legs, and Reacher, who checking out his father's home town, were good. The merge was a little clunky, but acceptable. The characters were (mostly) well written and I would love to see some of them again in future books. There weren't any unrealistic "oh, come on!" moments that I have come across in some of the others in the series. This certainly kept my interest and I will be recommending it to several friends.

I'm always eager to read Lee Child's latest. Here the locale seems more restricted than other Child narratives. There is 'action', but it almost seems cursory. I don't 'follow' Reacher for 'deep philopshical' thought, but his observations about people are often on target, his descriptions are apt, but 'Past Tense' already seems a bit worn.The 'action' is predictable; the situation(s) time worn.

PAST TENSE: A JACK REACHER NOVEL solves a mystery surrounding Jack’s parentage--who, exactly, was Jack’s father, a guy who could never remember his birthday? Reacher fans will want to read this novel to find out. But otherwise, except for the dramatic ending scenes, the novel is just plain boring.In the novel, Jack starts to hitchhike from the East Coast to San Diego, but takes a side trip to Laconia. NH, his father’s birthplace. He visits various public records offices, and gets a lot of help from the locals when dad Stan Reacher doesn't show up right away in the town’s 80-year-old census records.At the same time, a young Canadian couple has car trouble, and ends up at a remote motel near Laconia. They can’t leave, because the weird motel owners keep making excuses for not calling a mechanic or driving them to town to get a tow truck. Eventually the couple finds themselves imprisoned, because the motel owners have secret plans for them.SPOILER ALERT: Naturally the two plotlines--Jack’s search for his roots, and the couple’s predicament--merge, but only in a superficial way. The couple’s plotline is basically “Psycho" meets “The Most Dangerous Game", and it isn’t even close to the quality of either one. The motel owners’ intentions are easily guessed, long before the reveal.This novel is the latest in the long, popular Jack Reacher series, and it works fine as a standalone. It’s well-written, but, as previously mentioned, darned boring.

As happy as I was to receive the ARC of the new Jack Reacher novel, my disappointment matches. There were many familiar and endearing Reacherisms in this novel, but the small scale of the story seemed to limit the tale. The incidents in the woods were dreary, Ryantown not even a shadow of its heyday. There were good people populating the novel, and that was all the merrier given the bad people in the woods. Reacher had little to do with them, so it wasn't much of a Reacher story until the end. Ultimately Stan Reacher is found. How could a guy named Reacher live in a town until he was 90 years old and yet the name rang no bells at the county records office?I did enjoy seeing Jack Reacher again. I just wish he had more to do that was of interest. Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC.

not his best.