Whitcoulls Recommends: Exit Strategy and Good Things Come and Go

Exit Strategy by Lee Child and Andrew Child. Jack Reacher is back - this time in Baltimore, where he inadvertently gets himself caught up in corrupt goings on at the local Port. He walks into a coffee shop, and someone brushes against him - only later does he realise that a note was slipped into his pocket at that moment, from someone asking for help and requesting a late night rendezvous. The note was clearly intended for someone else but Jack heads along to the meeting anyway, just to see what’s going on. This is classic Reacher - he’s about to dispense a lot of vigilante justice and stand up for the good guys, before he gets onto another Greyhound bus and heads off for who knows where.

Good Things Come and Go by Josie Shapiro. Josie is an Auckland writer whose first book I loved - Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts. This is her second, and it’s equally good - about Penny and Riggs living in LA where things have gone terribly wrong for them, and the chance for Penny to come back to Auckland and hold a solo art exhibition is too good to ignore. They head back to Waiheke Island (and into the midst of complicated family dynamics) and reconnect with an old friend who’s down on his luck. The rekindling of that childhood friendship brings serious undercurrents, with long held secrets to be reckoned with. Josie is a terrific writer and I hope will be bringing us books for years to come. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News talks'b.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Joe McKenzie, Good morning, Good morning. Our first book today
is by Lee Child and Andrew Child. I'd just like
to say I think Lee Child's been one of my
favorite guests this year on the Sunday Session. He's just
such a delight to talk to, so humble and sort
of down to earth.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Is He's a very very nice man.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Yeah, No, Anyway, the book it's called Exit Strategy.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Yes, and I think it's very appropriate title actually, because
many listeners will know that Lee's brother, Andrew has been
taking over the writing of the series, and I believe
that this is the first one that Andrew has written
on his own, even though Lee's name is still on
the cover. So Exit Strategy, it seemed to me, is
kind of an appropriate title. And this is the third
and the affect ye, if I should say, in the

(00:55):
Jack Reacher series. So Jackson Baltimore, he's gone there for
a blues concert and while he's there, he walks into
a coffee shop and he feels somebody brush up against him,
and it's only later that he figures out that that
person must have slipped a note into his pocket asking
for help and giving the address of a place to
meet up for a late night meeting. And Jack's quite

(01:17):
clear that the note has been delivered to the wrong
person and was clearly intended for somebody else. But of course,
being Jack, he's intrigued enough to go along and see
what's going on, and there he meets a guy called
Nathan Gilmore who's in a bit of a spot of bother.
He used to work in military intelligence, which of course
Jack Reacher used to also, so there's a parallel there.

(01:39):
And after leaving, he struggled with a gambling addiction, and
he got down on his luck and he had lots
of debts, and some person came along and offered to
pay off all of the debts and get him a
job at the Baltimore Port, which he was terribly pleased about.
But in exchange, he was required to feed information about
shipments coming in through the port. So you get the picture.

(01:59):
There's bad stuff going on, of course there is, and
it all turns ugly, and Nathan and Jack decide to
talk to another worker at the who they think is
being blackmailed, and from there they start to unravel the
trail and figure out exactly what's going on. I reckon
this is classic Jack Reacher. He's drifting through America, he
finds himself in weird situations, he dispenses vigilante justice to

(02:22):
protect the vulnerable, and then he catches the next greyhound
out of town and he's off for the next adventure.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Ah, tell me about Josie Shapiro's new book. I loved
her first book, Everything Is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, because
it was about running, which I related to. But she's
a fabulous local writer.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
She is. And her new one is called Good Things
Come and Go. And while the first one was based
around running, this one has got skateboarding going on in
the background. Now, anybody who knows me would know that
running and skateboarding are most likely not my things, but
they make great backgrounds to the struggles and the hopes
and the aspirations of these characters. So it starts off

(03:04):
in Los Angeles, where in New Zealand, couple of living
pennies an artist and her dad is one of New
Zealand's most revered painters, and her partner is a professional
skateboarder whose career is on the way out and they're
very sad people because their young daughter recently died of
leukemia and they're both seriously adrift and they're in danger
of losing each other. The relationship's going to fold. So

(03:28):
when Pennies offered the chance to hold a solo exhibition
back in Auckland, they decide to come home, and they
come back to Wahiki Island, which was where they grew
up and their families still live, and they reconnect with
the childhood friend who's also a skateboarder. But the three
of them have got this shared but complicated history, and
now as adults with the lives that aren't going the

(03:49):
way they'd planned, there's all these undercurrents bubbling away which
threatened to derail them all. And I think Josie is
very clever. Her books I find compulsively readable. There's this
recognizable New Zealand landscape, but she writes people you can
believe in and that you want to read about, and
in a way, in a very small way. I know

(04:09):
this is normally associated with science fiction and you know
Game of Thrones type stuff, but I think that she
does world building in this small environment with an ecosystem
that connects these people with one another, and it just
feels so real.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
For more from the Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks That b from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio