Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've loved the Jack Reacher books from the beginning, and this is not one of them. There are some spoilers in here, but the plot is pretty much inherently spoiled so I'm not going to feel bad about that. First of all, this is no longer the 1970s. Experts in all fields abound and its easy for authors to get enough good information to make their stories at least semi-plausible. When they don't it comes off as comically lazy and ridiculous. The "plot" (and I'm stretching that word substantially) of The Sentinel literally makes no sense. It's like an information attack, as described by the mostly-senile boomer grandparents of their dim-witted "computer-genius" nephew who played an extremely minor part in the department fixed it (getting coffee or something). It's pure cringe to read, bordering on word salad. As someone who works in the field, I can tell you this: nobody needs a super-weapon to hack US elections. They don't even need much skill. All of the election security technology is so much of a joke, that when they had a voting machine and reporting systems hacking contests at BlackHat Las Vegas (one of the biggest annual IT security conferences) they had to limit entries to very young children. In 2018, an 11-year-old young lady defeated one in under 10 minutes. I am not making this up. Secondly, the love interest such as it is feels like it was forced in without the author's consent, which is ironic considering how Newly Woke Jack Reacher is. She's given perhaps a dozen paragraphs, total, most of which exist to make things happen Because The Plot Requires It. One of the more attractive things about the previous Jack Reacher novels is that they were largely apolitical. No Tom Clancy love sonnets to killing machines, and no caterwauling about this terrible group or the other. Just a guy out in the world trying to do good on his own terms. No more. The bad guys are Russians - of course - interfering with elections - of course - aided by neo-Nazis - of course. it couldn't possibly be more color-by-numbers, pun intended. Having grown up in the part of the US that still has some white supremacists, I can attest that the one accurate thing in this book is that they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Everything else is in smh territory: from defending the "mainstream press" against Russian "fake news," to punching Nazis ... extra-hard. More than once. Because it's important to impart to us readers - just in case it's news to us - that people with the misfortune of being born into economically-disadvantaged families that found some evil and nonsensical hatred to latch onto are extra-bad if the skin colors or genders or whatever else don't match. Anyway, it's a novel, it has Jack Reacher in it, but it's not a Jack Reacher novel in the traditional sense. Hope this helps people out before Amazon deletes my review for not delivering fawning praise for this.