Reviewed by Kristin
As I may have mentioned once or twice, I do enjoy Karin
Slaughter’s series based around Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will
Trent and medical examiner Sara Linton. I can just imagine the tall buildings
of the Atlanta skyline and the dusty red dirt of a Georgia small town when Will
and Sara fall into yet another case. (At least their adventures are related to
their jobs, as opposed to the small town cupcake bakery/knitting shop/antique
store proprietors who seem to have dead bodies turning up every time they open
the door. Sorry-not-sorry, cozy authors.)
Jack Reacher is a tough ex-military cop who achieves his goals
by any means possible. I have to admit that I’ve never read any Lee Child,
although I will have to give him a try one of these days. As soon as my to-be-read
pile is done, I promise.
In Cleaning the Gold, Slaughter and Child come together
to explore what might happen if their protagonists, Will Trent and Jack
Reacher, met each other. The men manage to finagle their way into Fort Knox,
both with individual motives. Reacher has his eye on a potential governmental
conspiracy, and Trent has his eye on Reacher. Twenty-two years ago in a small
Georgia town, a large blond man killed a sheriff’s deputy right in the public
library. Could Reacher have been that man?
The United States Treasury governing acts require that the
Fort Knox vaults be inspected annually, but every ten years a more extensive
measurement and accounting is undertaken. Those gold bars are heavy, and Trent
and Reacher are hired for their muscles. But with that much gold, greed and
dishonesty rear their ugly heads.
While a very short story at seventy-nine pages, I found this
to be a quick and enjoyable read. This may be enough to move Lee Child upwards
in my reading queue. Slaughter’s new novel The Last Widow (recently
reviewed here)
is previewed as well, taking up at least a third of the slim volume. Can one
story have more than one hero? If this has interested you at all, pick it up
and see how these two big guys interact.
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