The enemy

New Year’s Day, 1990. The Berlin Wall is coming down. Soon America won’t have any enemies left to fight. The army is under pressure to downsize. Jack Reacher is the duty Military Police officer on a base in North Carolina when he takes a call reporting a dead soldier. The body was found in a sleazy motel used by local hookers. Reacher tells the local cop to handle it — it sounds like the guy just had a heart attack. But the dead man turns out to have been a two-star general on a secret mission. And then, many miles away, when Reacher goes to the general’s house to break the sad news, he finds a battered corpse: the general’s wife. Lee Child’s new stomach-churning, palm-sweating thriller turns back the clock to Jack Reacher’s army days. For the first time we meet a younger Reacher, a Reacher not yet disillusioned with military life. A Reacher with family. A Reacher in dogtags and starched uniform who imposes army discipline, if only in his own pragmatic way. A Reacher as far from the no-credit card, no-last-known-address drifter of the previous eight novels as is possible to imagine.

Persuader

Never forgive, never forget. That’s Jack Reacher’s standard operating procedure. And Francis Xavier Quinn was the worst guy he had ever met. He had done truly unforgivable things. So Reacher was glad to know he was dead. Until the day he saw him, alive and well, riding in a limousine outside Boston’s Symphony Hall. Never apologize. Never explain. When Reacher witnesses a brutal attempt to kidnap a terrified young student on a New England campus, he takes the law into his own hands. That’s his way, after all. Only this time, a cop dies, and Reacher doesn’t stick around to explain. Has he lost his sense of right and wrong? Just because this time, it’s personal?

Echo Burning

Hitching rides is an unreliable mode of transport. In temperatures of over a hundred degrees, you’re lucky if a driver will open the door of his airconditioned car long enough to let you slide you in. That’s Jack Reacher’s conclusion. He’s adrift in the fearsome heat of a Texas summer, and he needs to keep moving through the wide open vastness, like a shark in the water. The last thing he’s worried about is exactly who picks him up. He never expected it to be somebody like Carmen. She’s alone, driving a Cadillac. She’s beautiful, young and rich. She has a little girl who is being watched by unseen observers. And a husband who is in jail. Who will beat her senseless when he comes out. If he doesn’t kill her first. Reacher is no stranger to trouble. And at Carmen’s remote ranch in Echo County there is plenty of it: lies and prejudice, hatred and murder. Reacher can never resist a lady in distress. Her family is hostile. The cops can’t be trusted. The lawyers won’t help. If Reacher can’t set things straight, who can?

The visitor

Two women, victims of sexual harassment, left the army under dubious circumstances. Both are now dead. Jack Reacher knew them both. A perfect psychological match, he is arrested, but is released when another woman is murdered. Everyone fears a serial killer is on the loose and Reacher finds himself heavily involved in the investigation.

Tripwire

Ex-military policeman Jack Reacher is lying low in Key West, digging up swimming pools by hand. He is not at all pleased when a private detective starts asking questions about him. But when the detective, Costello, turns up dead with his fingertips sliced off, Reacher realizes it is time to move on. As in Lee Child’s two previous thrillers, Die Trying and Killing Floor, Reacher

is soon up to his neck in lethal trouble, this time involving a vicious Wall Street manipulator,

a mysterious woman (of course), and the livelihood of a whole community. Even the fate of soldiers missing in action in Vietnam is stirred into the brew. But this is not a book by one of the new breed of US thriller writers. Child prides himself on his ability, as an Englishman, to write American thrillers that are utterly convincing in milieu and toughness of action, without a trace of English sensibility. Tripwire is no exception.