A Chicago street in bright summer sunshine: Jack Reacher, strolling nowhere, meets an attractive young woman, limping, struggling with her crutches, alone. Reacher stops to help, he takes her arm-into twin handguns held level and motionless and aimed straight at their stomachs.
Chained to the woman, locked in a dark, stifling van racing 2000 miles across America, Reacher needs to know who he’s dealing with:the kidnappers are saying nothing, the woman’s saying she’s Holly Johnson, FBI agent. She’s fierce enough and she’s tough eough, but he knows there must be more to her than that. And at their remote hostile destination he knows they must team up and trust each other, one man and one woman alone together, well matched and supremely resourceful, pitting raw courage and cunning against insane violence and seemingly hopeless odds, with their own lives and hundreds more at stake.