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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
May 2004, 400 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2005, 496 pages
'A fabulously suspenseful prequel that reveals Reacher's character as he uncovers a homicidal cabal of military officers....Child has turned away from formulaic high-jinks to explore his characters instead: The result? His best so far' - Kirkus.
Winner of the 2005 BookBrowse Ruby Award for Most Popular Book in Category
Jack Reacher. Hero. Loner. Soldier. Soldier's son. An elite military cop, he was one of the army's brightest stars. But in every cop's life there is a turning point. One case. One messy, tangled case that can shatter a career. Turn a lawman into a renegade. And make him question words like honor, valor, and duty. For Jack Reacher, this is that case.
New Year's Day, 1990. The Berlin Wall is coming down. The world is changing. And in a North Carolina 'hot-sheets' motel, a two-star general is found dead. His briefcase is missing. Nobody knows what was in it. Within minutes Jack Reacher has his orders: Control the situation. But this situation can't be controlled. Within hours the general's wife is murdered hundreds of miles away. Then the dominoes really start to fall.
Two Special Forces soldiers, the toughest of the tough, are taken down, one at a time. Top military commanders are moved from place to place in a bizarre game of chess. And somewhere inside the vast worldwide fortress that is the U.S. Army, Jack Reacher, an ordinarily untouchable investigator for the 110th Special Unit, is being set up as a fall guy with the worst enemies a man can have.
But Reacher won't quit. He's fighting a new kind of war. And he's taking a young female lieutenant with him on a deadly hunt that leads them from the ragged edges of a rural army post to the winding streets of Paris to a confrontation with an enemy he didn't know he had. With his French-born mother dying, and divulging to her son one last, stunning secret, Reacher is forced to question everything he once believed about his family, his career, his loyalties and himself. Because this soldier's son is on his way into the darkness, where he finds a tangled drama of desperate desires and violent death and a conspiracy more chilling, ingenious, and treacherous than anyone could have guessed.
Chapter One
As serious as a heart attack. Maybe those were Ken Kramer's last words, like a final explosion of panic in his mind as he stopped breathing and dropped into the abyss. He was out of line, in every way there was, and he knew it. He was where he shouldn't have been, with someone he shouldn't have been with, carrying something he should have kept in a safer place. But he was getting away with it. He was playing and winning. He was on top of his game. He was probably smiling. Until the sudden thump deep inside his chest betrayed him. Then everything turned around. Success became instant catastrophe. He had no time to put anything right. Nobody knows what a fatal heart attack feels like. There are no survivors to tell us. Medics talk about necrosis, and clots, and oxygen starvation, and occluded blood vessels. They predict rapid useless cardiac fluttering, or else nothing at all. They use words like infarction and fibrillation, but those terms mean nothing ...
BookBrowse Awards
2005
'The Enemy' is a treat for existing fans, because it's a prequel to the other books, taking Reacher back to his days as a military policeman at the end of the Cold War, revealing key information about why he became the person he is in the later books. Because this is a prequel it's also a great place for new readers to discover this excellent author.
If you liked The Enemy, try these:
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