Pre-numbered label used for registration.

paperback
465pp
published, 2004

FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Jack Reacher. The ultimate loner. An elite ex-military cop who left the service years ago, he moves from place to place...without family...without possessions...without commitments." "And without fear. Which is good, because trouble - big, violent, complicated trouble - finds Reacher wherever he goes. And when trouble finds him, Reacher does not quit. Not once. Not ever." "Now some unfinished business has found Reacher. And Reacher is a man who hates unfinished business." Ten years ago, a key investigation went sour. Someone got away with murder. But a chance encounter brings it all back. Now Reacher sees his one last shot. Some would call it vengeance. Some would call it redemption. Reacher would call it...justice.

SYNOPSIS
Jack Reacher.

The ultimate loner.

An elite ex-military cop who left the service years ago, he's moved from place to place…without family…without possessions…without commitments..

And without fear. Which is good, because trouble—big, violent, complicated trouble—finds Reacher wherever he goes.

FROM THE CRITICS
Entertainment Weekly
the story is...as tightly wound as Reacher himself

The Los Angeles Times
The publisher's blurb describes Lee Child as the best thriller writer you might not yet be reading, and for once a blurb speaks true. Child deserves to be galloped through because his writing is exuberant, ebullient and exciting. Persuader's hero, Jack Reacher, is resolute, ruthless, sure-footed and moral the way Raymond Chandler's Marlowe was moral — indifferent to laws and to what we whimsically call justice, interested only in doing the right thing. The right thing turns out to involve destruction and slaughter on a grand scale, but that's all right, because the villains deserve to be rubbed out with extreme prejudice, and they usually are. — Eugen Weber

Publishers Weekly
The promo copy on the ARC of Child's new thriller proclaims, "We dare to make this claim: Lee Child is the best thriller writer you're probably not reading-yet." Hopefully the "six-figure" marketing campaign promised by Child's new publisher will make that statement obsolete, because readers will be hard-pressed to find a more engaging thriller this spring season. Child is a master of storytelling skills, not least the plot twist, and the opening chapter of this novel spins a doozy, as a high-octane, extremely violent action sequence sees Child hero Jack Reacher rescue a young man, 20-year-old Richard Beck, from an attempted kidnapping before the rug is pulled out from under the reader with the chapter's last line. The rest of the novel centers on the Beck family's isolated, heavily guarded estate on the Maine coast where Reacher takes Richard. Richard's father is suspected by Feds of being a major drug dealer and the kidnapper of another Fed, and also seems to have ties to a fiend who killed Reacher's lady 10 years before, someone Reacher thought he'd killed in turn, in a vengeance slaying. Tension runs high, then extremely high, as Reacher, ingratiating himself with the dealer and hired on as a bodyguard, pokes around the estate, looking for the kidnapped Fed and evading and/or disposing of in-house bad guys as they begin to suspect he's not who he seems. But then little in Child's novels is as it at first seems, and numerous further plot twists spark the story line. What makes the novel really zing, though, is Reacher's narration-a unique mix of the brainy and the brutal, of strategic thinking and explosive action, moral rumination and ruthless force, marking him as one of the most memorable heroes in contemporary thrillerdom. Any thriller fan who has yet to read Lee Child should start now. (May 13) Forecast: The publisher is aiming at Father's Day sales, and with the help of a massive campaign, including print, radio and airline advertising, Child could be poised to reap the sort of sales he deserves. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal
Retired Army MP Jack Reacher embarks upon his seventh case when he's fingered by the FBI to infiltrate a crime syndicate and extricate a missing female undercover agent. In a breakneck first chapter that leaves the listener gasping, Jack whisks the crime boss's college-age son from an attempted kidnapping and grudgingly agrees to rush the terrified kid home to daddy. But insinuating Jack into the family compound was the goal all along-the FBI staged the kidnapping to put him undercover. Jack has 15 days to crack the case while he prowls for clues at an isolated coastal Maine estate, occasionally slipping off for an increasingly sizzling rendezvous with his sexy (female) FBI contact. An eye-for-an-eye kind of guy, Jack whittles away at an edgy entourage of murderers, molesters, and thieves like picking off steroid-plumped birds on a wire. This work is read by Dick Hill with a gritty masculinity that perfectly suits Jack. Every public library will want to add this to the other six Jack Reacher thrillers in their collections. Highly recommended.-Judith Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews
Surprise tops nasty surprise when former MP Jack Reacher stalks a nemesis from the past. Child (Without Fail, 2002) opens Reacher’s seventh case with an apparent ambush. As college student Richard Beck heads home, two men in a pickup cut off his limo, pull him out, and lob a grenade into the car, killing Beck’s bodyguards. Reacher, standing nearby, jumps into the fray, blows away the would-be abductors as well as a third man rushing onto the scene, who turns out to have been a plainclothes cop. The law never forgives cop killers, Reacher tells Beck, so off they flee to the student’s Maine family mansion. Then comes surprise #1: the ambush was meticulously staged by federal agents who want to plant Reacher inside the Beck fortress, where they want Reacher to rescue another agent who went missing in the same place a few weeks earlier. They also suspect that Beck’s father, a rug dealer, traffics in clandestine matters that tie him to Francis Xavier Quinn, who should have died ten years previously, when Reacher pushed him from a cliff. Quinn’s background ensues, becoming--for once!--a subplot that ratchets up suspense. Meanwhile, Reacher noses about the Beck’s latter-day Eagle’s Nest, whose depraved and degraded inhabitants have a Hitchcock flavor. Reacher also keeps dodging the estate’s security system in order to meet and make love to his operative. Back in Maine, the maid turns out to be an agent the feds know nothing of, Reacher learns (surprise #20, at least) what the Becks are up to, and he closes in on Quinn. The tension leading to Reacher and Quinn’s reunion could easily sustain a simple, two-man, High Noon–style face-off, but Child lays on and drags out the violence, the one time hisotherwise expertly judged work goes over the top. Wily plotting, swift pacing, mordant wit: Child is one skillful writer.

RELEASE NOTES:

on bench out front, inside Ziploc bag