Lee Child selects the twenty best mystery short stories of the year, including tales by Stephen King, Sara Paretsky, and many more.
Under the auspices of New York City's legendary mystery fiction specialty bookstore, The Mysterious Bookshop, and aided by Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler, international bestseller Lee Child has selected the twenty most suspenseful, most confounding, and most mysterious short stories from the past year, collected now in one entertaining volume.
Includes stories by: Alison Gaylin, David Morrell, James Lee Burke, Joyce Carol Oates, Martin Edwards, Sara Paretsky, Stephen King, Sue Grafton (with a new, posthumously published work), and many more!
Brought to you by Penguin.
Jack Reacher is back in a brand new white-knuckle read from Lee Child, creator of 'today's James Bond, a thriller hero we can't get enough of' (Ken Follett).
In a nameless city, two ruthless rival criminal gangs, one Albanian, the other Ukrainian, are competing for control. But they hadn't counted on Jack Reacher arriving on their patch.
Reacher is trained to notice things. He's on a Greyhound bus, watching an elderly man sleeping in his seat, with a fat envelope of cash hanging out of his pocket. Another passenger is watching too ... obviously hoping to get rich quick.
As the mugger makes his move, Reacher steps in. The old man is grateful, yet he turns down Reacher's offer to help him home. He's vulnerable, scared, and clearly in big, big trouble.
What hold could the gangs possibly have on the old guy? Will Reacher sit back and let bad things happen? Or can he twist the situation to everyone's benefit?
'This is a random universe,' he says. 'Once in a blue moon things turn out just right.'
The odds are better with Reacher involved. That's for damn sure.
Killing Floor is the first book in the internationally popular Jack Reacher series. It presents Reacher for the first time, as the tough ex-military cop of no fixed abode: a righter of wrongs, the perfect action hero.
Jack Reacher jumps off a bus and walks fourteen miles down a country road into Margrave, Georgia. An arbitrary decision he's about to regret. Reacher is the only stranger in town on the day they have had their first homicide in thirty years. The cops arrest Reacher and the police chief turns eyewitness to place him at the scene.
As nasty secrets leak out, and the body count mounts, one thing is for sure. They picked the wrong guy to take the fall.
Random House presents the audiobook edition of Tripwire by Lee Child, read by Jeff Harding.
For Jack Reacher being invisible has become a habit.
He spends his days digging swimming pools by hand and his nights as the bouncer in the local strip club in the Florida Keys.
He doesn't want to be found.
But someone has sent a private detective to seek him out. Then Reacher finds the guy beaten to death with his fingertips sliced off. It's time to head north and work out who is trying to find him and why.
Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Visitor by Lee Child, read by Jeff Harding.
Sergeant Amy Callan and Lieutenant Caroline Cooke have a lot in common.
Both were army high-flyers. Both were aquainted with Jack Reacher. Both were forced to resign from the service.
Now they're both dead.
Found in their own homes, naked, in a bath full of paint.
Apparent victims of an army man. A loner, a smart guy with a score to settle, a ruthless vigilante.
A man just like Jack Reacher.
Random House presents the audiobook edition of Die Trying by Lee Child, read by Jeff Harding.
Jack Reacher, alone, strolling nowhere.
A Chicago street in bright sunshine. A young woman, struggling on crutches. He offers her a steadying arm.
And turns to see a handgun aimed at his stomach.
Chained in a dark van racing across America, Reacher doesn't know why they've been kidnapped. The woman claims to be FBI. She's certainly tough enough. But at their remote destination, will raw courage be enough to overcome the hopeless odds?
Jack Reacher walks alone.
No job, no ID, no last known address. But he never turns down a plea for help. Now a woman tracks him down. A woman serving at the very heart of US power. A woman who needs Reacher's assistance in her new job.
Her job?
Protecting the Vice-President of the United States.
Her problem?
Someone wants the VP dead.
Random House presents the audiobook edition of Killing Floor by Lee Child, read by Jeff Harding.
Killing Floor is the first book in the internationally popular Jack Reacher series. It presents Reacher for the first time, as the tough ex-military cop of no fixed abode: a righter of wrongs, the perfect action hero.
Jack Reacher jumps off a bus and walks fourteen miles down a country road into Margrave, Georgia. An arbitrary decision he's about to regret.
Reacher is the only stranger in town on the day they have had their first homicide in thirty years.The cops arrest Reacher and the police chief turns eyewitness to place him at the scene. As nasty secrets leak out, and the body count mounts, one thing is for sure.
They picked the wrong guy to take the fall.
Late at night in a New York café army-cop-turned-drifter Jack Reacher orders coffee in a cup made of foam, not china, so that he can move on at a moment's notice.He owns nothing, carries less, has never encountered a female colleague he can't bed, or a case he can't solve.
But now Reacher is confronted by a situation so disturbing and deceptive that the truth eludes him.Has he painted targets on the good guys' backs?
So Reacher starts over at square one. He sweats the details and works the clues. As they used to say back in the service, he's doing it the hard way. Until what started on a busy New York street explodes three thousand miles away in the sleepy English countryside. With Reacher striding alone in the shadows. Armed and dangerous. Invincible.
New Year's Day, 1990.
A soldier is found dead in a sleazy motel bed. Jack Reacher is the officer on duty. The soldier turns out to be a two-star general. The situation is bad enough, then Reacher finds the general's wife.
This stomach-churning thriller turns back the clock to a younger Reacher, in dogtags. A Reacher who still believes in the service. A Reacher who imposes army discipline. Even if only in his own pragmatic way...
Jack Reacher, adrift in the hellish heat of a Texas summer.
Looking for a lift through the vast empty landscape. A woman stops, and offers a ride. She is young, rich and beautiful.
But her husband's in jail. When he comes out, he's going to kill her.
Her family's hostile, she can't trust the cops, and the lawyers won't help. She is entangled in a web of lies and prejudice, hatred and murder.
Jack Reacher never could resist a lady in distress.
