ELEVEN NUMBERS

5 stars out of 5

I'm not normally a fan of short stories, but I am a fan of this author - so I decided to give it a go. It is, after all, only 33 pages, so how bad could it be? Well, not bad at all; not only did I polish it off in less than half an hour, the story itself is five-star worthy in my book. 

Very short stories do, however, make reviewing nearly impossible; what can you say that won't give away the farm? That said, here goes anyway: Nathan Tyler, a math professor somewhere in the United States, is prepping to head to Moscow for a meeting of mathematic minds when he gets a strange phone call. That, in turn, puts him in a strange alliance with U.S. powers that be (at the highest level), who want him to deduce a password that would allow entry into a Kremlin system that could change the course of history. Since the Moscow mathematician who created it will be attending the same conference in his city, they want Tyler to do a meet-and-greet, get to know the guy, somehow figure out the password and pass it on.

Needless to say, all doesn't quite go as planned - and that's as far as I'll go except to recommend that others who find the description intriguing go get it. My thanks go to the publisher, via NetGalley, for the opportunity to read it.

Eleven Numbers by Lee Child (Amazon Original Stories, February 2025); 33 pp.