Worth Dying For, by Lee Child

Reacher has become one of my favorite characters over the past few years and Worth Dying For doesn’t disappoint. As usual, he doesn’t go looking for trouble, but it certainly finds him. When he runs into a drunk doctor in Nebraska refusing to treat what is almost certainly a case of domestic abuse, Reacher wades with both fists wailing and changes a county for the better, solving a twenty-five year old child abduction case as well. The ending is never in doubt, but the path from A to B is suspenseful and exciting.

A solid story and great characters are the hallmarks of Child’s novels, but I must admit I was a bit frustrated at the cold open. In the previous episode Reacher was caught in an explosion that he seemed unlikely to survive. Here, we find him simple wandering into a motel for a cup of coffee and cheap bed for the night with no explanation of how he escaped—much less avoiding the aftermath undetected. Didn’t hurt the story at all, but Child needs to figure out if these books are going to be isolated tales of cowboy justice or if they are truly a progression through time.

First Sentence:

Eldridge Tyler was driving a long straight two-lane road in Nebraska when his cell phone rang.

Gilligan’s Wake: A Novel, by Tom Carson

This is an amazing book, a true pop-culture smorgasbord. Seven vignettes make up this novel, one for each castaway from Gilligan’s Island. However, the characters aren’t as we remember or expect. We find Gilligan committed to the Cleaver Ward (across the hall from the Burt Ward) of a psychiatric hospital, insisting that he is Maynard G. Krebs and attended to by Dr. Kildare F. Troop. The Skipper describes his time serving in the U.S. Navy with McHale, JFK, and Nixon. Thurston Howell is a naive millionaire that gets mixed up with Alger Hiss and Communist spies; his wife Lovey a morphine-addicted lesbian paired with Daisy Buchanan. That’s when things start to get weird!

Ginger’s story (fittingly titled Hello Nurse) tells how she got into bondage porn with Bettie Page before getting thrown out of Sinatra’s house after a post-coital insult to Sammy Davis, Jr. The Professor is a narcissistic pedophile that was a part of the Manhattan Project, founded a secret society with Roy Cohn and Henry Kissinger that purposefully instigated schemes such as the Suez Canal crisis and the homeless problem, and briefly turns into Godzilla. Mary-Ann dates Jean-Luc Goddard in Paris and discovers she is not only doomed to be a perpetual virgin, but a fictional character to boot.

Subtle and not-so-subtle nods to the television series abound, such as each tale having a character or artifact named with an anagram of Gilligan, or working the word “castaway” and “minnow” into several passages. A man named John Gilbert Egan also figures into each story; at the close of the novel Mary-Ann’s imaginary roommate explains that Egan is actually the author and causes a breach in the fourth wall explaining to us, the readers, how the individual tales all knit together.

Surreal, clever, and inventive, this book was utterly fantastic.

First Sentence:

Skippertoo and get me home, I mean if you really want to hear about it.