Want to read the Reacher series but not sure where to start? This guide will tell you how to read the Jack Reacher books in order, so you can start with book one and work your way through all thirty!
The Jack Reacher series comprises of thirty thrilling books, all centred around the enigmatic Jack Reacher.
An ex-military policeman turned vigilante hero, Reacher finds himself in all sorts of high-stakes adventures across America and beyond.
But with so many books in the series, it can be hard to know where to begin and which order to read them.
Order to read the Jack Reacher novels
Killing Floor Lee Child
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.
Die Trying Lee Child
Jack Reacher, alone, strolling nowhere.
A Chicago street in bright sunshine. A young woman, struggling on crutches. Reacher 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?
Tripwire Lee Child
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.
The Visitor Lee Child
Two female army high-flyers. Both acquainted with Jack Reacher. Both 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.
Echo Burning Lee Child
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.
Without Fail Lee Child
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.
Persuader Lee Child
Never forgive, never forget.
Jack Reacher lives for the moment. Without a home. Without commitment. But he has a burning desire to right wrongs – and rewrite his own agonizing past.
Never apologize. Never explain.
When Reacher witnesses a brutal kidnap attempt, he takes the law into his own hands. But a cop dies. Has Reacher lost his sense of right and wrong?
The Enemy Lee Child
North Carolina. 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 body of 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 . . .
One Shot Lee Child
Six shots. Five dead.
A heartland city thrown into terror. But within hours the cops have it solved. A slam-dunk case. Apart from one thing. The accused gunman refuses to talk except for a single phrase:
Get Jack Reacher for me.
Reacher lives off the grid. He's not looking for trouble. But sometimes trouble looks for him. What could connect the noble Reacher to this psychopathic killer?
The Hard Way Lee Child
Jack Reacher is alone, the way he likes it.
He watches a man cross a New York street and drive away in a Mercedes. The car contains $1 million of ransom money. Reacher's job is to make sure it all turns out right - money paid, family safely returned.
But Reacher is in the middle of a nasty little war where nothing is simple.
What started on a busy New York street explodes three thousand miles away, in the sleepy English countryside.
Reacher's going to have to do this one the hard way.
Bad Luck And Trouble Lee Child
You do not mess with Jack Reacher.
He is as close to untraceable as a person can get. A loner comfortable in his anonymity and solitude. So when a member of his old Army unit finds a way to contact him, he knows this has to be serious.
You do not mess with the Special Investigators.
In the past the elite team always watched each other's backs. Now one of them has shown up dead in the California desert and six more are missing.
Reacher's old buddies are in big trouble, and he can't let that go.
Nothing To Lose Lee Child
Between two small towns in Colorado, nothing but twelve miles of empty road.
All Jack Reacher wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets are four redneck deputies, a vagrancy charge and a trip back to the line.
But Reacher is a big man, and he's in shape.
No job, no address, no baggage. Nothing, except bloody-minded curiosity.
What are the secrets the locals seem so determined to hide?
Gone Tomorrow Lee Child
Suicide bombers are easy to spot.They give out all kinds of tell-tale signs. There are twelve things to look for. No one who has worked in law enforcement will ever forget them.
New York City. The subway, two o'clock in the morning.Jack Reacher studies his fellow passengers. Four are OK. The fifth isn't.The train brakes for Grand Central Station.
Will Reacher intervene, and save lives?Or is he wrong? Will his intervention cost lives - including his own?
61 Hours Lee Child
HOUR SIXTY-ONE
Icy winter in South Dakota. A bus skids and crashes in a gathering storm. On the back seat: Jack Reacher, hitching a ride to nowhere. A life without baggage has many advantages. And disadvantages too, like facing the arctic cold without a coat.
HOUR THIRTY-ONE
A small town is threatened by sinister forces. One brave woman is standing up for justice. If she's going to live to testify, she'll need help from a man like Reacher. Because there's a killer coming for her.
HOUR ZERO
Has Reacher finally met his match? He doesn't want to put the world to rights. He just doesn't like people who put it to wrongs.
Worth Dying For Lee Child
There's trouble in the deadly wilds of Nebraska . . . and Reacher walks right into it. He falls foul of the Duncans, a local clan that has terrified an entire country into submission.
But it's the unsolved case of a missing eight-year-old girl that Reacher can't let go.
Reacher - bruised and battered - should have just kept going. But for Reacher, that was impossible.
What, in this fearful county, would be worth dying for?
The Affair Lee Child
March 1997. A woman has her throat cut behind a bar in Mississippi.
Just down the road is a big army base. Is the murderer a local guy - or is he a soldier?
Jack Reacher, still a major in the military police, is sent in undercover.
The county sheriff is a former U.S. Marine - and a stunningly beautiful woman. Her investigation is going nowhere. Is the Pentagon stonewalling her? Or is she trying not to find the killer?
Set just six months before the opening of Killing Floor, The Affair marks a turning point in Reacher's career.
A Wanted Man Lee Child
When you're as big and rough as Jack Reacher - and you have a badly set, freshly busted nose - it isn't easy to hitch a ride in Nebraska. At last, he's picked up by three strangers - two men and a woman.
Within minutes it becomes clear they're all lying about everything - and there's a police roadblock ahead. There has been an incident, and the cops are looking for the bad guys . . .
Will they get through because the three are innocent? Or because the three are now four? Is Reacher just a decoy?
Never Go Back Lee Child
After an epic and interrupted journey all the way from the snows of South Dakota, Jack Reacher has finally made it to Virginia. His destination, the closest thing to a home he ever had: the headquarters of his old unit, the 110th Military Police.
Why? He wants to meet the new commanding officer, Major Susan Turner. He liked her voice on the phone. But now he's arrived, she's disappeared, and things are getting weird.
Accused of a sixteen-year-old homicide and co-opted back into the army, Reacher says nothing.
But he's sure as hell thinking of a way out.
Personal Lee Child
Jack Reacher walks alone.
Once a go-to hard man in the US military police, now he's a drifter of no fixed abode. But the army tracks him down. Because someone has taken a long-range shot at the French president.
Only one man could have done it. And Reacher is the one man who can find him.
This new heartstopping, nailbiting book in Lee Child's number-one bestselling series takes Reacher across the Atlantic to Paris – and then to London.
The stakes have never been higher – because this time, it's personal.
Make Me Lee Child
Jack Reacher has no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there.
A remote railroad stop on the prairie with the curious name of Mother's Rest seems perfect for an aimless one-day stopover. He expects to find a lonely pioneer tombstone in a sea of nearly-ripe wheat.
Instead there is a woman waiting for a missing colleague, a cryptic note about two hundred deaths, and a small town full of silent, watchful people.
Reacher's one-day stopover turns into an open-ended quest leading to the most hidden reaches of the internet, and right into the nightmare heart of darkness.
Night School Lee Child
It's just a voice plucked from the air: 'The American wants a hundred million dollars'.
For what? Who from? It's 1996, and the Soviets are long gone. But now there's a new enemy. In an apartment in Hamburg, a group of smartly-dressed young Saudis are planning something big.
In the morning they gave Reacher a medal, and in the afternoon they sent him back to school.
Jack Reacher is fresh off a secret mission. The Army pats him on the back and sends him to a school with only three students: Reacher, an FBI agent, and a CIA analyst. Their assignment?
To find that American. And what he's selling. And to whom.
The Midnight Line Lee Child
Jack Reacher is having a bad day.
It would be a dumb idea to make it worse.Reacher sees a West Point class ring in a pawn shop window. It's tiny. It's a woman cadet's graduation present to herself. Why would she give it up? Reacher was a West Pointer too, and he knows what she went through to get it.
All he wants is to find the woman.
He'll have to go through bikers, cops, crooks, and low-life muscle.If she's ok, he'll walk away. If she's not . . . he'll stop at nothing.
Best advice: stay out of his way.
Past Tense Lee Child
The present can be tense . . .
A young couple trying to get to New York City are stranded at a lonely motel in the middle of nowhere. Before long they're trapped in an ominous game of life and death.
But the past can be worse . . .
Meanwhile, Jack Reacher sets out on an epic road trip across America. He doesn't get far. Deep in the New England woods, he sees a sign to a place he has never been - the town where his father was born. But when he arrives he is told no one named Reacher ever lived there. Now he wonders: who's lying?
As the tension ratchets up and these two stories begin to entwine, the stakes have never been higher for Reacher.
That's for damn sure.
Blue Moon Lee Child
It's a random universe, but once in a blue moon things turn out just right.
In a nameless city, two rival criminal gangs 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 ... 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 have on the old guy? Will Reacher be in time to stop bad things happening?
The odds are better with Reacher involved. That's for damn sure.
The Sentinel Lee Child, Andrew Child
Jack Reacher gets off the bus in a sleepy no-name town outside Nashville, Tennessee. He plans to grab a cup of coffee and move right along.
Not going to happen.
The town has been shut down by a cyber attack. At the centre of it all, whetherhe likes it or not, is Rusty Rutherford. He's an average IT guy, but he knows more than he thinks.
As the bad guys move in on Rusty, Reacher moves in on them . . .
And now Rusty knows he's protected, he's never going to leave the big man's side.
Reacher might just have to stick around and find out what the hell's gone wrong . . . and then put it right, like only he can.
Better Off Dead Lee Child, Andrew Child
Reacher never backs down from a problem.
And he's about to find a big one, on a deserted Arizona road, where a Jeep has crashed into the only tree for miles around. Under the merciless desert sun, nothing is as it seems.
Minutes later Reacher is heading into the nearby border town, a backwater that has seen better days. Next to him is Michaela Fenton, an army veteran turned FBI agent, who is trying to find her twin brother. He might have got mixed up with some dangerous people.
And Reacher might just need to pay them a visit.
Their leader has burrowed his influence deep into the town. Just to get in and meet the mysterious Dendoncker, Reacher is going to have to achieve the impossible.
To get answers will be even harder. There are people in this hostile, empty place who would rather die than reveal their secrets.
But then, if Reacher is coming after you, you might be better off dead.
No Plan B Lee Child, Lee Child and Andrew Child, Andrew Child
The gripping new Jack Reacher thriller from the No.1 bestselling authors Lee Child and Andrew Child.
Gerrardsville, Colorado. One tragic event. Two witnesses. Two conflicting accounts. One witness sees a woman throw herself in front of a bus – a clearly suicide. The other witness is Jack Reacher. And he sees what really happened – a man in grey hoodie and jeans, swift and silent as a shadow, pushing the victim to her death, before grabbing her bag and sauntering away.
Reacher follows the killer, not knowing that this was no random act of violence. It is part of something much bigger . . . a sinister, secret conspiracy, with powerful people on the take, enmeshed in an elaborate plot that leaves no room for error. If any step is compromised, the threat will have to be quickly and permanently removed.
But when the threat is Reacher, there is No Plan B . . .
The Secret Lee Child, Andrew Child
Chicago. 1992. A hospital patient wakes to find two strangers by his bed.
They show him a list of names and ask a simple but impossible question. Minutes later he falls to his death from his twelfth-floor window - a fall which generates some unexpected attention.
That attention comes from the Secretary of Defense, who calls for an inter-agency task force to investigate. Jack Reacher, recently demoted from Major, is assigned as the Army's representative. If he gets a result, great. If not, he's a convenient fall guy.
Reacher may be an exceptional military investigator, but office politics aren't what gets him up in the morning. As he races to identify a cold-blooded killer and uncover a secret that stretches back 23 years, he must navigate around his new partners.
Will Reacher bring the bad guys to justice the official way . . . or his way?
In Too Deep Lee Child, Andrew Child
Jack Reacher wakes up, alone, in the dark, handcuffed to a makeshift bed. His right arm has suffered some major damage. His few possessions are gone. He has no memory of getting there.
The last thing Reacher can recall is the car he hitched a ride in getting run off the road. The driver was killed.
His captors assume Reacher was the driver's accomplice and patch up his wounds as they plan to make him talk.
A plan that will backfire spectacularly . . .
Exit Strategy Lee Child, Andrew Child
Jack Reacher will make three stops today. Not all of them were planned for.
First – a Baltimore coffee shop. A seat in the corner, facing the door. Black coffee, two refills, no messing about. A minor interruption from two of the customers, but nothing he can’t deal with swiftly. As he leaves, a young guy brushes against him in the doorway. Instinctively Reacher checks the pocket holding his cash and passport. There's no problem. Nothing is missing.
Second – a store to buy a coat. Nothing fancy. Something he can ditch when he heads to warmer climes. Large enough to fit a man the size of a bank vault. As he pulls out his cash, he finds something new in his pocket. A handwritten note. A desperate plea for help.
Third – wherever this bend in the road takes him. Impressed by the guy's technique and intrigued by the message, Reacher makes it his mission to find out more . . .
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