From a helicopter high above the empty California desert, a man is sent free-falling into the night.... In Chicago, a woman learns that an elite team of ex-army investigators is being hunted down one by one.... And on the streets of Portland, Jack Reacher--soldier, cop, hero--is pulled out of his wandering life by a code that few other people could understand. From the first shocking scenes in Lee Child's explosive new novel, Jack Reacher is plunged like a knife into the heart of a conspiracy that is killing old friends...and is on its way to something even worse.

A decade postmilitary,...

Susan Mark, the fifth passenger, had a big secret, and her plain little life was being watched in Washington, and California, and Afghanistan--by dozens of people with one thing in common: They're all lying to Reacher. A little. A lot. Or just enough to get him killed. A race has begun through the streets of Manhattan, a maze crowded with violent, skilled soldiers on all sides of a shadow war. For Jack Reacher, a man who trusts no one and likes it that way, the finish line comes when you finally get face-to-face and look your worst enemy in the eye.

By 1858, construction on a new railroad from Mobile, Alabama, to Cairo, Illinois, had intersected the Fulton/Pontotoc Road near an area called Gum Pond. That location contained large numbers of tupelo gum trees, and the intersection became known as Tupelo. Many merchants in surrounding communities, like Harrisburg and Richmond, realized that the intersection was going to be a prime area for commerce and began disassembling buildings that housed places of business and relocating them to Tupelo. By the beginning of the Civil War, there were two stores, two hotels, two saloons, and a temporary...