Reacher wakes up, alone, in the dark, handcuffed to a bed in a makeshift hospital room. His few possessions are gone. He has no memory of getting there. The last thing he can recall is the car he had hitched a ride in getting run off the road. The driver was killed. The people who staged the attack assume Reacher was the driver's accomplice and patch up his wounds as they plan to make him talk.

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,...

Emma is hitchhiking across the United States, trying to outrun a violent, tragic past, when she meets Lowell, the hot-but-dumb driver she hopes will take her as far as the Badlands. But Lowell is not as harmless as he seems, and a vicious scuffle leaves Emma bloody and stranded in an abandoned town in the Black Hills with an out-of-gas van, a loaded gun, and a snowstorm on the way. The town is eerily quiet and Emma takes shelter in a diner, where...

In this collection of short stories, Archer gifts us with a dozen different tales ranging from murder mysteries to bildungsromans to war stories based on real events that have critics comparing him to Dumas, Dahl, and Maugham.

"This is a novel about a down-and-outer and his small daughter and his attempt to provide more for her than she has been given either by him or her mother. Trucks, an aging boxer, breaks his daughter, Claudia, out of a children's home in Wisconsin one night during the dead of winter. She is a winsome, feisty little girl who tries to hold her father to account, and Trucks loves her unconditionally. He gives her used hearing aids to help with her deafness,...