Gone tomorrow

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The last time we saw Jack Reacher, he was cleaning up a nasty little burg called Despair, Colorado (Nothing to Lose, 2008); now he's tackling a different kind of town: New York City. It all starts on the subway, when Reacher spots a woman exhibiting all 11 of the signs used by Israeli counterintelligence to identify suicide bombers. In the aftermath of what happens on that 6 train, Reacher finds himself in the crosshairs of the FBI, the Department of Defense, the NYPD, one wannabe senator, and two women the most formidable foes of all whose provenance and motives are unclear but who are clearly up to no good. Reacher, former army MP, is the ultimate man alone, pledging no allegiances in a world gone gray, but put a bully in his face, and he'll find a reason to stay in town. This time there are multiple bullies, but Reacher is not easy to stop, even when the odds are 19 to 1, as they appear to be in the full-throttle, blood-splattered finale a brilliant set piece that hits home with the impact of a Reacher head butt. Summarizing Reacher novels always makes them sound more cartoonish than they are; like Stephen Hunter, Child grounds his hero's hard body and hard-drive brain in believable detail, and he sets the action against a precisely described landscape (this is a superb New York novel, offering, among other things, a virtual user's guide to the subway). If you're a reader whose pulse pounds when a top-notch thriller writer hits his stride, and if you're not afraid to watch the bullet hit its target, then it's a safe bet that you're already a Lee Child fan.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

All good thriller writers know how to build suspense and keep the pages turning, but only better ones deliver tight plots as well, and only the best allow the reader to match wits with both the hero and the author. Bestseller Child does all of that in spades in his 13th Jack Reacher adventure (after Nothing to Lose). Early one morning on a nearly empty Manhattan subway car, the former army MP notices a woman passenger he suspects is a suicide bomber. The deadly result of his confronting her puts him on a trail leading back to the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and forward to the war on terrorism. Reacher finds a bit of help among the authorities demanding answers from him, like the NYPD and the FBI, as well as threats and intimidation. And then there are the real bad guys that the old pro must track down and eliminate. Child sets things up subtly and ingeniously, then lets Reacher use both strength and guile to find his way to the exciting climax. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

When a young woman blows her brains out on a New York subway a few feet from Jack Reacher, he becomes understandably perturbed. His quest to find out why takes the large and lethal Clint Eastwood-like loner back to the Cold War and reveals a connection to presidential politics in this 13th Reacher novel (after Nothing to Lose), complete with cover-ups and numerous intriguing twists. The government is hiding something, and al Qaeda wants something-but what? All the while, goons from both sides assault and kidnap Reacher and two cops who are his companions. Reacher concludes that the Pentagon staffer who killed herself had some kind of information critical to national security. As the dead and injured pile up, the ever-resourceful and vengeful Reacher takes on nearly a score of the bad guys in an exciting climax to an enthralling book that is as satisfying as its predecessors. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/09; coming in June is a debut thriller, Even (LJ 3/1/09), by Child's younger brother, Andrew Grant.-Ed.]-Robert Conroy, Warren, MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Jack Reacher (Nothing to Lose, 2008, etc.), latter-day gunslinger and nomad, finds his latest killing fields in New York City. Reacher is riding the subway, riding it to nowhere, or anywhere, his destinations of choice these days. Having decided that the constraints of military life have slipped past burdensome into painfully boring, he's packed in a long and lustrous career. Now he takes his missions where he finds them, and he's about to find a beauty. It's the wee hours, the passenger population sparse, when Reacher spots a woman seated some 30 feet away who intrigues himbetter put, she causes the hairs on the back of his neck to rise. Not because she's particularly menacing. Actually, most would construe her as a 40-year-old paradigm of harmlessness, but Reacher has become aware that she conforms precisely to the 11-point "list of behavioral indicators" passed on to him years back by Israeli counterintelligence. In short, Reacher's convinced he's looking at a suicide bomber. Is he, isn't he, what will happen if he confronts her? Thereby hangs the tale, and before it's fleshed out, Reacher will have had issues with an inimical variety: the NYPD, the FBI, an ambitious would-be U.S. senator with festering secrets, a pair of ferocious Afghan ladies, as programmed to kill as other ladies are to lunch, and an extended line of miscellaneous miscreants dumb enough to engage him. No one kicks butt as entertainingly as Reacher. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter One Suicide bombers are easy to spot. They give out all kinds of tell-tale signs. Mostly because they're nervous. By definition they're all first-timers. Israeli counterintelligence wrote the defensive playbook. They told us what to look for. They used pragmatic observation and psychological insight and came up with a list of behavioral indicators. I learned the list from an Israeli amy captain twenty years ago. He swore by it. Therefore I swore by it too, because at the time I was on three weeks' detached duty mostly about a yard from his shoulder, in Israel itself, in Jerusalem, on the West Bank, in Leb anon, sometimes in Syria, sometimes in Jordan, on buses, in stores, on crowded sidewalks. I kept my eyes moving and my mind running free down the bullet points. Twenty years later I still know the list. And my eyes still move. Pure habit. From another bunch of guys I learned another mantra: Look, don't see, listen, don't hear. The more you engage, the longer you survive. The list is twelve points long if you're looking at a male suspect. Eleven, if you're looking at a woman. The difference is a fresh shave. Male bombers take off their beards. It helps them blend in. Makes them less suspicious. The result is paler skin on the lower half of the face. No recent exposure to the sun. But I wasn't interested in shaves. I was working on the eleven-point list. I was looking at a woman. I was riding the subway, in New York City. The 6 train, the Lexington Avenue local, heading uptown, two o'clock in the morning. I had gotten on at Bleecker Street from the south end of the platform into a car that was empty except for five people. Subway cars feel small and intimate when they're full. When they're empty they feel vast and cavernous and lonely. At night their lights feel hotter and brighter, even though they're the same lights they use in the day. They're all the lights there are. I was sprawled on a two-person bench north of the end doors on the track side of the car. The other five passengers were all south of me on the long bench seats, in profile, side on, far from each other, staring blankly across the width of the car, three on the left and two on the right. The car's number was 7622. I once rode eight stops on the 6 train next to a crazy person who talked about the car we were in with the same kind of enthusiasm that most men reserve for sports or women. Therefore I knew that car number 7622 was an R142A model, the newest on the New York system, built by Kawasaki in Kobe, Japan, shipped over, trucked to the 207th Street yards, craned onto the tracks, towed down to 180th Street and tested. I knew it could run two hundred thousand miles without major attention. I knew its automated announcement system gave instructions in a man's voice and information in a woman's, which was claimed to be a coincidence but was really because the transportation chiefs believed such a division of labor was psychologically compelling. I knew the voices came from Bloomberg TV, but years before Mike became mayor. I knew there were six hundred R142As on the tracks and that each one was a fraction over fifty-one feet long and a little more than eight feet wide. I knew that the no-cab unit like we had been in then and I was in now had been designed to carry a maximum of forty people seated and up to 148 standing. The crazy person had been clear on all that data. I could see for myself that the car's seats were blue plastic, the same shade as a late summer sky or a British Air Force uniform. I could see that its wall panels were molded from graffiti-resistant fiberglass. I could see its twin strips of advertisements running away from me where the wall panels met the roof. I could see small cheerful posters touting television shows and language instruction and easy college degrees and major earning opportunities. I could see a police notice advising me: If you see someth Excerpted from Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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