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Lee Child confirms his early acclaim with this tale, as swift and stylish as any suspense novel being written today.
On the publication of Lee Child's debut novel, the multiple award-winning Killing Floor, critics nationwide marked its success. "Fascinating" (The New York Times), "riveting" (Boston Sunday Globe), "irresistible" (People), "will blow you away" (The Philadelphia Inquirer), they hailed. Last year's Die Trying inspired even more: "a suspense writer to be reckoned with" (Chicago Tribune) and "[Reacher is] one of the more fully realized and intelligently resourceful heroes to come along in years" (Rocky Mountain News).
In Tripwire, Reacher is settling into lazy Key West when his life is interrupted by a stranger who comes looking for him. When the stranger turns up beaten to death in the Old Town cemetery--fingertips removed--Reacher knows whomever the man was working for is not a friend. Reacher follows the trail to New York, where he confronts the people who dispatched the dead man: an elderly couple still mourning an all-American son lost in Vietnam; an alluring and intelligent woman from Reacher's own haunted past; and at the center of the web, an opponent more vicious than any he's ever faced.
Lee Child confirms his early acclaim with this new tale, as swift and stylish as any suspense novel being written today.
Prologue
Hook Hobie owed the whole of his life to a secret nearly thirty years old. His liberty, his status, his money, everything. And like any cautious guy in his particular situation, he was ready to do what was necessary to protect his secret. Because he had a lot to lose. The whole of his life.
The protection he relied on for nearly thirty years was based on just two things. The same two things anybody uses to protect against any danger. The same way a nation protects itself against an enemy missile, the same way an apartment dweller protects himself against a burglar, the same way a boxer guards against a knockout blow. Detection and response. Stage one, stage two. First you spot the threat, and then you react.
Stage one was the early-warning system. It had changed over the years, as other circumstances had changed. Now it was well rehearsed and simplified. It was made up of two layers, like two concentric tripwires. The first tripwire was eleven thousand miles ...
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Rain must pursue his most dangerous quarry yet through the crosshairs of the CIA and the Japanese mafia, where the differences between friend and foe and truth and deceit are as murky as the rain-slicked streets of Tokyo.
This intricate thriller ignites in the very first chapter as anthropologist heroine Jane Doe employs the theories of Claude Levi-Strauss, quotes W. H. Auden, kills a drunken woman using advanced aikido techniques and rescues an abused child whom she raises as her own.