The Midnight Line
A Jack Reacher Novel
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4.3 • 342 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Lee Child returns with a gripping new powerhouse thriller featuring Jack Reacher, “one of this century’s most original, tantalizing pop-fiction heroes” (The Washington Post).
BONUS: Includes a sneak peek of Lee Child’s new novel, Past Tense.
Reacher takes a stroll through a small Wisconsin town and sees a class ring in a pawn shop window: West Point 2005. A tough year to graduate: Iraq, then Afghanistan. The ring is tiny, for a woman, and it has her initials engraved on the inside. Reacher wonders what unlucky circumstance made her give up something she earned over four hard years. He decides to find out. And find the woman. And return her ring. Why not?
So begins a harrowing journey that takes Reacher through the upper Midwest, from a lowlife bar on the sad side of small town to a dirt-blown crossroads in the middle of nowhere, encountering bikers, cops, crooks, muscle, and a missing persons PI who wears a suit and a tie in the Wyoming wilderness.
The deeper Reacher digs, and the more he learns, the more dangerous the terrain becomes. Turns out the ring was just a small link in a far darker chain. Powerful forces are guarding a vast criminal enterprise. Some lines should never be crossed. But then, neither should Reacher.
Praise for The Midnight Line
“Puts Reacher just where we want him.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A gem.”—Chicago Tribune
“A timely, suspenseful, morally complex thriller, one of the best I’ve read this year . . . Child weaves in a passionately told history of opioids in American life. . . . Child’s outrage over it is only just barely contained.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A perfect example of Lee Child’s talent . . . Lee Child is the master of plotting. . . . This is Child’s most emotional book to date. . . . This is not just a good story; it is a story with a purpose and a message.”—Huffington Post
“I just read the new Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. . . . It is as good as they always are. I read every single one.”—Malcolm Gladwell
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
"Sometimes you woke up, and you knew for sure … that the brand new day would bring nothing good at all.” From the desolate wilds of Wyoming to a criminal empire run out of a laundromat in Rapid City, Iowa, The Midnight Line digs deep into the dark underbelly of America’s heartland. Lee Child’s slow-burn thriller not only challenges Jack Reacher’s deductive skills, but also tests his stubborn code of honor as he tracks down a traumatized Afghan War vet. What follows is a mystery that confronts the insidious impact of America’s opioid epidemic. And one that may surprise fans of Child's blockbuster hero with its weary sense of melancholy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Child's superlative 22nd Jack Reacher novel picks up where 2015's Make Me left off. While riding a bus in Wisconsin to the next "end-of-the-line place," Reacher gets off at a rest stop "on the sad side of a small town." In a pawn shop window, he spots a West Point ring, class of 2005, sized for a small woman. As a West Pointer himself, Reacher knows what it takes to earn that ring and he wants to find out who it belonged to and why it was pawned. The trail takes him to Rapid City, S.Dak., where he encounters shady Arthur Scorpio ostensibly a laundromat owner, but of interest to local police and a private investigator from Chicago and, eventually, to Wyoming. The identity of the ring's owner is established reasonably quickly, and her backstory (and what Reacher does about it) takes the reader from the wars in Afghanistan to the opioid crisis in America (including a damning thumbnail history of how corporate America has profited from selling heroin in one form or another and a devastating portrait of opioid addiction). As usual, Child makes his narrative entirely credible and compulsively readable.
Customer Reviews
Reacher rolls on, and on.
Always good to have Reacher along with a story to tell
But, as with some other of Lee
Child’s novels, there is a lot of filler. There could be some more substance to get me fully entertained.
Midnight line - what else, another great Reacher story
While not as combative or action-related as some other episodes, I really enjoyed this story. And learned a lot about opioids and the devastating effects on lives.
Already looking for the next one.
Midnight Line
Boring and repetitive until the end. Lee child is way better than this and His next book needs to have way more substance. I have read all his books and this one is a real disappointment. The next one will determine whether I keep buying his books.