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Pure thriller bubblegum. First one i recall where Reacher doesn't sleep with a main character.

However well paced, the premise is the worst of the Reachers so far. The idea that a survivor of the Soviet gulags has set up a cement kickback scheme in rural Indiana, and that it's lucrative enough to kill 6 people over, along with an elaborate scheme to involve a soldier, making him repeat a crime he committed 20 years earlier so that he'd be blamed? Not to mention the timelines don't add up. But if you can suspend disbelief, it's a fun ride.

Supposedly this is a literary thriller, but there's a lot wrong and dumb about this.

1. The author really really likes run-on sentences.
2. This is not how hacking works.
3. The villain is the worst mustache-twirler.
4. His plot isn't how ultra rich people plot, with intricate conspiracies that depend on hiding all the facts. Rather, they do it in the open, with plausible deniability.
5. Twirler has to keep his purchase of a farm secret, when he could just buy it.
6. He randomly decides to possess a young naive trespassing gardener and fund her gardening collective in some sort of secret challenge grant makes no sense.
7. He supplies LSD to the collective for no apparent reason.
8. He does a bunch of these near the site of his nefarious plot for no good reason, endangering his plan.
9. Twirler changes the gate code for no good reason. The real reason is the author needed the victim to be walking alone at dark.

The kids' motivations feel somewhat authentic, but everything else about this book is irritating.

The Enemy takes Reacher back to 1990, when he's still in the army, still an MP. Still follows the Reacher formula though: he sleeps with the girl, doesn't seem to get anywhere for a while, then makes a series of leaps but doesn't tell others until he gets his ducks lined up.

Very interesting world building. Sentient flying trains. A great bargain that includes all sorts of creatures as people. It's very thought provoking.

But the story and characters drag a lot at times. For instance, the second section follows data gatherers as they figure out where to put public transportation on the world of Sask-E. But since they're essentially surveyors, it's not that exciting and mostly the characters spend all their time talking.

And while i see what the author is doing with the sex scenes, it's a lot like watching porn I'm not into. Very mechanical and not at all titillating. So those come off as dry too.

Anyway, other folks may enjoy the parts i disliked. They weren't bad. They just didn't resonate with me.