If you’re looking for a book series about a man with big hands and a bad attitude, you’ve come to the right place Jack Reacher is ready to use those hands on twelve dudes in a dark alleyway, all at once. Sorry, that sounded wrong. Violence, mayhem, and frequent face punching, these Jack Reacher books are the best of the best, ranked.
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Without Fail thrills, without fail. Like a B-list action movie ex-military operative convinced by his old handlers to do “one last job,” Reacher’s past goes back to haunt him. And this time, it’s personal. Reacher’s brother’s old flame M.E. Froelich contacts Reacher with a deliciously ludicrous offer: help her assassinate the Vice president. Reacher’s response? A huge, ham-fisted thumbs up. Stakeouts. Assassinations. Reacher falling into bed with a femme fatale. This book’s got it all. Are things gonna work out for the lovebirds? It’s a Reacher novel, what do you think?
If you don’t like The Enemy, then an enemy is what you’ve made of me. The Enemy is a prequel. The prequel of all prequels. Canonically, it’s the “first” of the Jack Reacher novels. Jack Reacher’s fresh out the Army but already jaded as hell. He’s working as a military investigator doing what he does best, investigating. In this case, it’s the death of a major general. But this ain’t no Pirates of Penzance type of major general (for all you theatre kids out there) this guy’s dirtier than the mouth of a phone sex enthusiast. Reacher learns that the military is hardly to be trusted.
Gone Tomorrow is so good that if a bookstore got a hundred new copies today, I’d expect them to be sold out in the exact time frame that the title suggests. This novel begins with a bang, in the form of a suicide bomber on a crowded subway. It doesn’t let up from there. Shadowy Russian elites. Mujahideen operatives. Soviet-era snipers. This novel is as off the wall as Michael Jackson’s fifth album. The cherry on top? A celebrity cameo from Osama bin Laden himself.
The plot of Tripwire is as tight and dangerous as the title suggests. Jack Reacher’s out of the game. He’s done. He’s retired from the operative life, living in Florida working as a bouncer and a ditch digger – every retiree’s dream. He’s dragged back into the biz kicking and screaming by a shadowy private eye who gets him in hot water with an even shadowier money launderer with a hook for a hand. You can’t make this shit up. It’s downright ridiculous Reacher, absolutely glorious. The best part? Reacher takes a bullet in the chest but he stops it dead with his copious amount of pectoral muscle. That’s the American way, just like Teddy Roosevelt.
If Never Go Back is your first Reacher novel, you’ll do exactly what the title suggests to any and all other books you were reading. Reacher is back and brolic as ever. He’s returned to DC to finally meet the former commander of his old unit, but in classic Reacher fashion, it doesn’t go as planned. Reacher’s old commander has been arrested, and now he’s wanted for a decade old murder that threatens to drag him back into the clutches of the Army he ran from. Oh, and someone thinks he’s the father of their child. So there’s that.
Personal is a personal best for Reacher. Someone tried to assassinate the President of France with a sniper rifle bullet from nearly a mile a way, and Reacher has to figure out who. The person to (almost) make such a skillful shot must be one dangerous customer indeed. A cookie so tough, they’ve got rusted nails for chocolate chips. Who could it be? One of Reacher’s oldest enemies. A man Reacher thought he put away for good. A U.S. Army sniper whose 15 year jail stint gave him oodles of time to plan revenge. A man named John Kott.
If Jack Reacher had exactly the amount of opportunities the title of this book suggests to impress me, then One Shot was all he needed. Good enough to be adapted into a big budget Tom Cruise Hollywood joint, this novel is about a mysterious shooter who fired six shots to kill five people, with only one bullet left behind. One bullet is all Reacher needs to find the perp, and he’s gonna return that bullet personally. Meanwhile, he also has to clear the name of an old Army associate that got pinned for the crime, even if that man is guilty of a separate, unpunished crime from long ago. It’s a delicious moral dilemma.
Worth Dying For is a novel worth doing just what the title suggests to read it. It’s a Western, true and true. Reacher wanders into a middle of nowhere town, a stranger in a strange land, and mops up the trouble therein. Somehow Reacher manages to make even Nebraska exciting. How? By punching a domestic abuser in the face. The guy’s family wants out for revenge, and Reacher is happy to oblige.
It all had to begin somewhere. Killing Floor is the ground floor on which the series was built. The first Reacher novel ever penned, it’s about a fresh from the Army Jack Reacher drifting through the American South following the steps of a favorite blues musician. He certainly finds something to get the blues about, once he’s arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. Rather than simply put the long arm of the law in a cast and skip town, he decides to root out small town corruption instead. Because he’s Reacher. That’s what he does.
Bad Luck and Trouble finds Reacher smack dab in the middle of both. One of his old Army buddies was thrown from a helicopter over the California desert, and in case you’re wondering, the bad guys didn’t pack him a parachute. Now Reacher has to team up with a woman that he used to serve with in order to avenge the death of his former comrade. It is prime Reacher. As prime as the titular beefsteak’s muscle himself. A tough plot with a tender center, it’s equal parts high stakes thrills and messy “what is my life” emotions. Reacher’s most personal story yet.
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