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Book summary and reviews of A Wanted Man by Lee Child

A Wanted Man by Lee Child

A Wanted Man

A Jack Reacher Novel

by Lee Child

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  • Published:
  • Sep 2012
    416 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Four people in a car, hoping to make Chicago by morning. One man driving, eyes on the road. Another man next to him, telling stories that don’t add up. A woman in the back, silent and worried. And next to her, a huge man with a broken nose, hitching a ride east to Virginia.

An hour behind them, a man lies stabbed to death in an old pumping station. He was seen going in with two others, but he never came out. He has been executed, the knife work professional, the killers vanished. Within minutes, the police are notified.  Within hours, the FBI descends, laying claim to the victim without ever saying who he was or why he was there.

All Reacher wanted was a ride to Virginia. All he did was stick out his thumb. But he soon discovers he has hitched more than a ride. He has tied himself to a massive conspiracy that makes him a threat - to both sides at once.

In Lee Child’s white-hot thriller, nothing is what it seems, and nobody is telling the truth. As the tension rises, the twists come fast and furious, keeping readers guessing and gasping until the explosive finale.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. ...We think a lot of things for a while...but almost all our assumptions turn out to be false. Mostly, though, we don't have much time for thinking, since we're strapped into various Ford Crown Victorias - the standard-issue automobile of local cops and the FBI alike - careening down midwestern interstates as Reacher, sometimes a captive, sometimes a pursuer, plots to save the endangered and smite those who do the endangering." - Booklist

"While the erratic trip through America's heartland doesn’t always follow a logical path, Reacher displays his acuity, patience, endurance, and military skills in the exhilarating fashion series fans have come to expect." - Publishers Weekly

"Here, Jack Reacher returns, exactly six minutes after the end of Worth Dying For; what happens next should be thrilling." - Library Journal

This information about A Wanted Man was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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Will Harper

This is the worst Reacher book ever
The ending of this book made me want to get run over while trying to hitchhike. This book started out good and took a wrong turn ending ridiculously. Please please don't read this book. I have already got the next book so I am reading it while I write this.

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Author Information

Lee Child Author Biography

Photo: Sigrid Estrada

Lee Child was born in the exact geographic center of England, in the heart of the industrial badlands. Never saw a tree until he was twelve. It was the sort of place where if you fell in the river, you had to go to the hospital for a mandatory stomach pump. The sort of place where minor disputes were settled with box cutters and bicycle chains. He's got the scars to prove it.

But he survived, got an education, and went to law school, but only because he didn't want to be a lawyer. Without the pressure of aiming for a job in the field, he figured it would be a relaxing subject to study. He spent most of the time in the university theater - to the extent that he had to repeat several courses, because he failed the exams - and then went to work for Granada Television in ...

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