In Too Deep begins with a car crash on a twisty mountain road in the Ozarks. The driver is dead, and Reacher, the passenger, is injured and suffers near-term amnesia as a result. Reacher soon gets involved with the driver’s confederates, a group of high-end art thieves. The thieves steal valuable works from private collections, whose owners rarely want to report their losses. The thieves’ latest targets are collections stashed in several mansions near the crash site. Reacher’s long-term memory and sense of morality are intact, so he intends to bring the thieves down. He soon gains a “partner,” Jenny Knight, a Phoenix police detective. She’s after one thief in particular, a massive individual named Kane, who killed her father during one of the crew’s earlier robberies that went wrong.

There’s no honor among this group of thieves, as they spend most of the novel trying to double-cross (and often eliminate) one another. The authors shift the point of view from chapter to chapter between Reacher and Vidik, the thieves’ leader, so readers can see both of them put their opposing plans together. Unsurprisingly, the bad guys’ plans often involve eliminating Reacher once he’s no longer helpful. As Reacher tries to figure out what the thieves are planning, readers are also engaged in the same process.

In Too Deep offers a great example of an unreliable narrator. Reacher’s faulty memory leaves him in the dark for much of the book about certain key events, including the actual identity of the dead man in the car with him. The villains lie to each other and conceal information. Eventually, the authors reveal just what the bad guys were planning. The clues readers need to figure it out for themselves are there, although well concealed. In the book’s first few pages, something strange happens at the scene of the car crash, but it all makes sense a couple hundred pages later.

Many readers expect action in Jack Reacher books, and the authors deliver in “In Too Deep.” Reacher gets in several fights with some of the villains, but he’s operating under a substantial handicap. He broke his wrist in the car crash and may have suffered a concussion. As a result, he can’t use one arm or his head as a weapon. He has to think through each fight, planning each maneuver carefully. I don’t recall reading another book in which the authors take readers inside a character’s plan as he calculates each move in a fight that lasts less than a minute. This method of describing the action was far more interesting than a standard blow-by-blow description other authors provide in many similar thrillers.

Some of the thieves plan to make this heist their last robbery. That doesn’t mean they’ve decided to retire and live off their illicit earnings. Instead, the hacker who figured out the security arrangements for many of their robberies used her computer abilities to uncover other confidential data that companies and individuals will now pay them substantial amounts of blackmail money to keep quiet. The ultimate MacGuffin she’s uncovered is a top-secret report of “earth-shaking” importance they are selling to the highest bidder. Reacher must put an end to the gang’s corporate espionage as well as the art thefts.

Although I enjoyed In Too Deep a great deal, I thought the ultimate revelation of the secret report’s contents was beyond ridiculous. When I read it, I put my e-reader down and said to myself, “You’ve got to be kidding.” The authors clearly intended this revelation to shock readers, but it had the opposite effect. Besides this enormous gaffe, the authors rely too much on other worn-out tropes. Jenny Knight provides a potential romantic interest for Reacher but is also a convenient source for distracting information dumps, which she sometimes offers. The book also relies too often on coincidences to move the plot along.

I found In Too Deep refreshingly different from what I was expecting in my first “Jack Reacher” novel. There’s plenty of action, but it’s portrayed innovatively, highlighting Reacher’s wits rather than his brawn. His injuries also make the fights more hazardous for him. What I enjoyed most, however, was the intricate and elaborate plotting Reacher and the villains go through. The actual heist is clever, but not spectacular. Instead, the human chess, often punctuated by violent consequences for the losers, reminded me of the best Richard Stark work. I was glad to wind up in too deep in this novel.

NOTE: The publisher graciously provided me with a copy of this book through NetGalley. However, the decision to review the book and the contents of this review are entirely my own.