by Lee Child (Get the Book)If a Lee Child novel begins with Jack Reacher standing by the side of a highway with his thumb out, you can be sure that the wrong guy is going to pick him up. You can also be sure that the novel will end with Reacher standing by the side of another highway, again with his thumb out. In between, all hell will break loose, with the mysterious Reacher, the man with no home, in the middle of it, subduing bad guys one bullet, or one head butt, at a time. In this seventeenth series installment, the wrong guys who pick Reacher up on a lonely Nebraska highway turn out to be two murderers and their female hostage or at least that's who we think they are, for a while. We think a lot of things for a while about terrorists, Homeland Security bumblers, warring FBI factions, and undercover agents but almost all our assumptions turn out to be false. Mostly, though, we don't have much time for thinking, since we're strapped into various Ford Crown Victorias the standard-issue automobile of local cops and the FBI alike careening down midwestern interstates as Reacher, sometimes a captive, sometimes a pursuer, plots to save the endangered and smite those who do the endangering. There may not be as much actual violence in this novel as in other Reachers, but when it comes, it comes in thunder, and the tension leading up to it feels never-ending. Our mothers were surely right to warn us against hitchhiking, both because the wrong guys might pick us up and, especially, because we're not Jack Reacher, much as we'd like to be. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Jack Reacher prefers to come and go across the country anonymously, but that's not at all true of the novels in which he appears. The publication of every new Reacher is heralded through every possible form of mass communication. Boy, would Reacher hate that. --Boooklist
