Lee Child does something different with “Persuader,” his seventh Jack Reacher novel.

He writes it in Reacher’s voice.

Instead of the omnipresent narrator of the first novels, Reacher is the narrator in “Persuader” – all 465 pages of the book.

And that’s the problem.

All those thousands of words don’t seem in character with the Reacher introduced in past novels or even in this novel. Reacher isn’t dumb or slack. He’s a retired Army captain, a former military police investigator, who’s been kept busy ever since he walked away from a lifetime in the military. He’s thorough. He’s a details guy but he’s never struck me as a guy who says a whole lot. Child usually has him saying very little, and what he does say, he says in a few crisp lines.

So paragraph after paragraph of narration seems out of character, especially when it comes to describing rooms he’s entered, etc. These seem like things he would notice but wouldn’t bother using several hundred words to describe to someone.

To see if Child continues making Reacher the narrator in subsequent books – and there are nearly two dozen more – would be as simple as opening the next novel, “The Enemy.” Longtime readers already know the answer but I’ll wait a few weeks until reading the next one to find out.

All that said, “Persuader” is a good read. 

Unofficially, Reacher goes undercover to find an undercover federal agent who is missing, expose a criminal syndicate and take down a brutal killer who some how survived and got away years earlier when Reacher was still a military police officer. Those are three of his objectives but he has to deal with a lot of layers of subterfuge and bad guys – including a malicious giant who makes the 6-foot-6 Reacher look small.

“Persuader” has all of the hallmarks of a great Lee Child novel – even if Jack Reacher does talk too much.