Carter Crossing, Mississippi. 1997. A lonely railroad track. A crime scene. A coverup. A young woman is dead, and solid evidence points to a soldier at a nearby military base. But that soldier has powerful friends in Washington. Reacher is ordered undercover--to find out everything he can, to control the local police, and then to vanish.

"Skilled, cautious, and anonymous, Jack Reacher is perfect for the job: to assassinate the vice president of the United States. Theoretically, of course. A female Secret Service agent wants Reacher to find the holes in her system, and fast -- because a covert group already has the vice president in their sights. They've planned well. There's just one thing they didn't plan on: Reacher." -- back cover.

"Jack Reacher lives for the moment. Without a home. Without commitment. And with a burning desire to right wrongs--and rewrite his own agonizing past. DEA agent Susan Duffy is living for the future, knowing that she has made a terrible mistake by putting one of her own female agents into a death trap within a heavily guarded Maine mansion. Staging a brilliant ruse, Reacher hurtles into the dark heart of a vast criminal enterprise. Trying to rescue...

Reacher wakes up, alone, in the dark, handcuffed to a bed in a makeshift hospital room. His few possessions are gone. He has no memory of getting there. The last thing he can recall is the car he had hitched a ride in getting run off the road. The driver was killed. The people who staged the attack assume Reacher was the driver's accomplice and patch up his wounds as they plan to make him talk.

War and romance collide in the sweltering heat and political unrest of 1960's Aden--a port city in today's Yemen--where the British Royal Military Police battle local militia in an intense struggle to control the strategically important port. The officers know only too well that a lapse in luck or judgment risks death. But do they know what their wives are risking at the local country club, where the swinging '60s are in full swing?

"April 1944, the fifty-fifth month of the war in Europe. The entire island of Britain fairly buzzes with the coiled energy of a million men poised to leap the Channel to France, the first, riskiest step in the Allies' long slog to the heart of Germany and the end of the war. Lieutenant Eddie Harkins is tasked to investigate the murder of Helen Batcheller, an OSS analyst. Harkins is assigned a British driver, Private Pamela Lowell, to aid in his investigation....

Dean Ellis Kohler, aspiring rock star, is drafted and sent to Vietnam, where he forms a rock 'n' roll band at the behest of his Captain.

Ex-military investigator Jack Reacher is called in by James Barr, a man accused of a lethal sniper attack that leaves five people dead, and teams up with a young defense attorney to find an unseen enemy who is manipulating events.