Victor is staying in a small-town motel, when he notices that a woman and her son have gone missing, and he decides to investigate. Nine books into the Victor the Assassin series, we suddenly get a plot that’s straight ouf a Jack Reacher novel, complete with run-ins with the local bike gang, one-against-nine fist fights, pairing up with a female police officer to do an investigation, and so on. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Jack Reacher books, but Victor the Assassin is not, and should not try to be, Jack Reacher.
Part of the problem is that throughout the entire series, Victor has always been a loner, to levels that could reasonably be described as sociopathic. On top of that, one of his trademark qualities is how paranoid he is, and the countless rules he follows to protect himself: e.g., hitting elevator buttons with his knuckles to avoid leaving fingerprints, never doing anything that garners unnecessary attention, never sleeping at night, never sleeping in a bed, never taking a shower (only baths, as showers interfere with your hearing), and so on. So seeing Victor ignore all of his rules to help out some strangers seems completely out-of-character for him.
The other problem is that what makes Jack Reacher work is not just the desire to help others and the fighting, but also the humor. There are a lot of witty one-liners, silly characters, and scenes designed to make you laugh. It’s the balance of investigation, action, and humor that makes Reacher work. Victor can occasionally be mildly amusing, but it’s not quite enough to achieve the same balance.
The book is still reasonably entertaining, Victor is still clever and a badass, and there’s plenty of action, but the book didn’t feel like a Victor the Assassin book, nor a Jack Reacher book, but some strange blend of the two that didn’t quite work for me.
