The ultimate thrill ride
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GONE TOMORROW Could a suicide bomber be unlucky 13 for Jack Reacher? With the 13th book, it looks like Jack Reacher’s luck could finally be about to run out. But before you side with superstition remember that fortune is more likely to favour a man who leaves nothing to chance…
It’s two o’clock in the morning in the New York City subway. Reacher studies his fellow passengers and realises most are normal folk – but passenger number four definitely isn’t.
Sitting opposite him is a woman showing all the signs of a suicide bomber.
There are certain things to look for and, after “His arms flailed and he collapsed forward and his upper body momentum levered him over the locked pivot of his immobile hips and took him straight out through the open door, into the noisy darkness, into the gale-force rotor wash, into the night.” Thousands of feet above the Californian desert, a man is thrown out of a helicopter to his death. This is 9/11, no-one who has ever worked in law enforcement will ever forget the checklist. As Reacher looks at her, the tell-tale signs scream out. They are unmistakably there: “Not a perfect view, but good enough to ring every bell on the elevenpoint list. The bullet headings lit up like cherries on a Vegas machine. “According to Israeli intelligence I was looking at a suicide bomber.” As the train brakes for Grand Central Station, the woman slowly reaches inside her bag… Will Reacher intervene and save lives, or is he wrong? Could his intervention cost lives – including his own? no ordinary man. He happens to be one of Jack Reacher’s old buddies, an ex-military Special Investigator – and you don’t mess with them... or Jack Reacher.
As close to untraceable as a person can get, Reacher is a loner comfortable in his anonymity. But he is as loyal as he’s tough, and as deadly as he’s determined.
Not only has a member of the elite team from his old Army unit been found dead – six more are missing.
When a deposit into Reacher’s bank account spells out an old military police alert code – 1030: urgent assistance needed – alarm bells start ringing in Reacher’s head.
He won’t be cashing in on his new-found wealth, he’ll be adding up the clues to solve the mystery and rescue his old comrades. “There was a loud bright explosion inside the car. I stared at the cop. He was on his back in the gutter. His whole chest was a mass of red. It was all over him. There was no welling or pumping. No sign of a heartbeat. There was a big ragged hole in his shirt. He was completely still.” When Reacher goes ‘rogue’ the world seems a scary place. But has he? In Persuader, it seems Jack Reacher’s moral compass is pointing in the wrong direction for once and the world has lost its defender.
When he witnesses a brutal kidnap attempt in Boston the guardian of all things good doesn’t respond as expected; instead Reacher takes the law in to his own hands and a cop gets shot…
But there is one thing that pervades Jack’s every thought and every action – he has a burning desire to right wrongs and rewrite his own agonising past.
He never apologises. He never explains.
But his latest actions beg an answer to the question: Has Reacher lost his sense of right and wrong?