We all love Jack Reacher and we all love Lee Child. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t. We are now at #22 of the Jack Reacher novels with The Midnight Line published in 2017. As usual, we will have one more year to wait until the next book, #23. In an interview with the BBC, he casually dropped the name of the book he is in the process of writing. The book will have the title Yesterday.
While there is not much information about the book yet (Lee Child only started writing the book on September 1, which is the date he is starting to write all his new books), we know that it will deal more with Jack Reacher’s father and allow us to fill in the gaps about this background character.
We also know that with this book, he will slightly change the writing style of the beginning of the first chapter. From the usual short and clipped phrases and sentences, the author will switch to longer and more fluid words.
Of course, that won’t last for long because soon enough we will get drawn back into the usual snappy style with a sentence like “He didn’t get very far,” which is a nail-biting and gripping sentence right there. Just the way we like to read our Jack Reacher stories.
Yesterday will be published at the end of next year, which for us, long time fans, means a whole year of wait.
If you’ve read all the Jack Reacher books, while waiting for Yesterday, you could do worse than listening to Lee Child giving a master class on how to write a short story in only 12 hours.
Just read “Past Tense”, not his usual style to begin with and took too long to get into the story proper. Whilst I enjoyed the read it did not hold me in the same way as his past books. The ending of the conflict was surprising with too many loose ends, nine dead bodies just laid about where they fell, including his namesake, and Reacher known by the local police to have been in the area. Methinks he might be a fugitive by now.