The Enemy

You're in the army now, son... New Year's Day, 1990. The Berlin Wall is coming down. The Cold War is ending. Soon America won't have any enemies left. The army won't have anybody to fight. Things are going to change.

Jack Reacher is the Military Police duty officer on a base in North Carolina when he takes a call reporting a dead soldier in a hot-sheets motel. Reacher tells the local cops to handle it - heart attacks happen all the time. I don't know but I've been told... But why is Reacher in North Carolina, instead of Panama, where the action is?

Then the dead man turns out to have been a two-star general who should have been in Europe. And when Reacher goes to the general's house to break the news, he finds another corpse: the general's wife. What is he dealing with here? The last echoes of the old world...Or the first shocks of the new?

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.

About the Author

LEE CHILD is British but moved with his family from Cumbria to the United States to start a new career as an American thriller writer. His first novel, Killing Floor, won the Anthony Award, and his second, Die Trying, won W H Smith's Thumping Good Read Award.

He lives just outside New York City, with his American wife, Jane. They have a grown-up daughter, Ruth, and a small dog called Jenny. Lee fills his spare time with music, reading, and the New York Yankees. All his thrillers feature Jack Reacher, the former US military cop and maverick drifter, and all have been bestsellers. He likes to travel, for vacations, but especially on promotion tours so he can meet his readers, to whom he is eternally grateful.