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![The Visitor (Jack Reacher, Book 4) by [Lee Child]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51RaHjIyziS._SY346_.jpg)
The Visitor (Jack Reacher, Book 4) Kindle Edition
Lee Child (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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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.
_________
Although the Jack Reacher novels can be read in any order, The Visitor is the 4th in the series.
And be sure not to miss Reacher's newest adventure, no.26, Better off Dead! ***OUT NOW***
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTransworld Digital
- Publication date4 September 2008
- File size4704 KB
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Review
"Reacher is one of the more interesting suspense heroes to come along in a while."--San Antonio Express News
"A superior series."--The Washington Post Book World
"A great read."--St. Petersburg Times
"Spectacular...muscular, energetic prose and pell-mell pacing."--The Seattle Times
"Jack Reacher, the wandering folk hero of Child's superb line of thrillers faces a baffling puzzle in his latest adventure...a brain-teasing puzzle that gets put together piece by fascinating piece...and a central character with Robin Hood-like integrity and an engagingly eccentric approach to life."--Publishers Weekly
"Deeply satisfying...plan to stay up long past bedtime and do some serious hyperventilating toward the end."--Kirkus Reviews
"This fourth Reacher thriller is easily the best. The plot is a masterpiece. Reacher belongs at the same table with...Parker's Spenser."--Booklist
"With numerous plot twists and turns, Child puts Reacher through his paces brilliantly, arriving at an unusual solution. Highly recommended."--Library Journal
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Book Description
From the Back Cover
Sergeant Amy Callan and Lieutenant Caroline Cook have a lot in common. They’re both high-flying army career women, they’re both victims of sexual harassment by their superiors, they’re both forced to resign from the service.
And now they’re both dead.
They’re discovered in their own homes, naked, in baths filled with army-issue camouflage paint, their bodies completely unmarked. Expert FBI psychological profilers start the hunt for a serial murderer, a smart guy with a score to settle, a loner, an army man, a ruthless vigilante known to them both.
Jack Reacher, former US military cop, is a smart guy, a loner and a drifter, as tough as they come. He knew both victims. For Agent-in-Charge Nelson Blake and his team he’s the perfect match. They’re sure only Reacher has the answers to their burning questions: how did these women die? Any why?
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
People say that knowledge is power. The more knowledge, the more power. Suppose you knew the winning numbers for the lottery? All of them? Not guessed them, not dreamed them, but really knew them? What would you do? You would run to the store, is what. You would mark those numbers on the playslip. And you would win.
Same for the stock market. Suppose you really knew what was going to go way up? You're not talking about a hunch or a gut feeling here. You're not talking about a trend or a percentage game or a whisper or a tip. You're talking about knowledge. Real, hard knowledge. Suppose you had it? What would you do? You would call your broker, is what. You would buy. Then later you'd sell, and you'd be rich.
Same for basketball, same for the horses, whatever, anything. Football, hockey, next year's World Series, any kind of sports at all, if you could predict the future, you'd be home and dry. No question. Same for the Oscars, same for the Nobel Prize, same for the first snowfall of winter. Same for anything.
Same for killing people.
Suppose you wanted to kill people. You would need to know ahead of time how to do it. That part is not too difficult. There are many ways. Some of them are better than others. Most of them have drawbacks. So you use what knowledge you've got, and you invent a new way. You think, and you think, and you think, and you come up with the perfect method.
You pay a lot of attention to the set-up. Because the perfect method is not an easy method, and careful preparation is very important. But that stuff is meat and drink to you. You have no problem with careful preparation. No problem at all. How could you, with your intelligence? After all your training?
You know the big problems will come afterward. How do you make sure you get away with it? You use your knowledge, is how. You know more than most people about how the cops work. You've seen them on duty, many times, sometimes close up. You know what they look for. So you don't leave anything for them to find. You go through it all in your head, very precisely and very exactly and very carefully. Just as carefully as you would mark the lottery slip you knew for sure was going to win you a fortune.
People say that knowledge is power. The more knowledge, the more power. Which makes you just about the most powerful person on earth. When it comes to killing people. And then getting away with it.
Life is full of decisions and judgements and guesses, and it gets to the point where you're so accustomed to making them you keep right on making them even when you don't strictly need to. You get into a what if thing, and you start speculating about what you would do if some problem was yours instead of somebody else's. It gets to be a habit. It was a habit Jack Reacher had in spades. Which was why he was sitting alone at a restaurant table and gazing at the backs of two guys twenty feet away and wondering if it would be enough just to warn them off or if he would have to go the extra mile and break their arms.
It was a question of dynamics. From the start the dynamics of the city meant that a brand new Italian place in Tribeca like the one Reacher was in was going to stay pretty empty until the food guy from the New York Times wrote it up or an Observer columnist spotted some celebrity in there two nights in a row. But neither thing had happened yet and the place was still uncrowded, which made it the perfect choice for a lonely guy looking to eat dinner near his girlfriend's apartment while she worked late at the office. The dynamics of the city. They made it inevitable Reacher would be in there. They made it inevitable the two guys he was watching would be in there, too. Because the dynamics of the city meant any bright new commercial venture would sooner or later get a visit on behalf of somebody wanting a steady three hundred bucks a week in exchange for not sending his boys in to smash it up with baseball bats and axe handles.
The two guys Reacher was watching were standing close in to the bar, talking quietly to the owner. The bar was a token affair built across the corner of the room. It made a neat sharp triangle about seven or eight feet on a side. It was not really a bar in the sense that anybody was ever going to sit there and drink anything. It was just a focal point. It was somewhere to keep the liquor bottles. They were crowded three deep on glass shelves in front of sandblasted mirrors. The register and the credit-card machine were on the bottom shelf. The owner was a small nervous guy and he had backed away into the point of the triangle and was standing with his backside jammed against the cash drawer. His arms were folded tight across his chest, defensively. Reacher could see his eyes. They were showing something halfway between disbelief and panic and they were darting all around the room.
It was a large room, easily sixty feet by sixty, exactly square. The ceiling was high, maybe twenty or twenty-five feet. It was made of pressed tin, sandblasted back to a dull glow. The building was more than a hundred years old, and the room had probably been used for everything, one time or another. Maybe it had started out as a factory. The windows were certainly large enough and numerous enough to illuminate some kind of an industrial operation back when the city was only five storeys tall. Then maybe it had become a store. Maybe even an automobile showroom. It was big enough. Now it was an Italian restaurant. Not a checked-red-tablecloth and Mama's-sauce type of Italian restaurant, but the type of place which has three hundred thousand dollars invested up front in bleached avant-garde decor and which gives you seven or eight handmade ravioli parcels on a large plate and calls them a meal. Reacher had eaten there ten times in the four weeks it had been open and he always left feeling hungry. But the quality was so good he was telling people about it, which really had to mean something, because Reacher was no kind of a gourmet. The place was named Mostro's, which as far as he understood Italian translated as monster's. He wasn't sure what the name referred to. Certainly not the size of the portions. But it had some kind of a resonance, and the whole place with its pale maple and white walls and dull aluminium accents was an attractive space. The people who worked there were amiable and confident. There were entire operas played beginning-to-end through excellent loudspeakers placed high on the walls. In Reacher's inexpert opinion he was watching the start of a big reputation.
But the big reputation was obviously slow to spread. The spare avant-garde decor made it OK to have only twenty tables in a sixty-by-sixty space, but in four weeks he had never seen more than three of them occupied. Once he had been the only customer during the whole ninety-minute span he spent in the place. Tonight there was just one other couple eating, five tables away. They were sitting face to face across from each other, side-on to him. The guy was medium-sized and sandy. Short sandy hair, fair moustache, light brown suit, brown shoes. The woman was thin and dark, in a skirt and a jacket. There was an imitation leather briefcase resting against the table leg next to her right foot. They were both maybe thirty-five and looked tired and worn and slightly dowdy. They were comfortable enough together, but they weren't talking much.
The two guys at the bar were talking. That was for sure. They were leaning over, bending forward from the waist, talking fast and persuading hard. The owner was against the register, bending backward by an equal amount. It was like the three of them were trapped in a powerful gale blowing through the room. The two guys were a lot bigger than medium-sized. They were dressed in identical dark wool coats which gave them breadth and bulk. Reacher could see their faces in the dull mirrors behind the liquor bottles. Olive skin, dark eyes. Not Italians. Syrians or Lebanese, maybe, with their Arab scrappiness bred out of them by a generation of living in America. They were busy emphasizing one point after another. The guy on the right was making a sweeping gesture with his hand. It was easy to see it represented a bat ploughing through the bottles on the shelf. Then the hand was chopping up and down. The guy was demonstrating how the shelves could be smashed. One blow could smash them all, top to bottom, he was suggesting. The owner was going pale. He was glancing sideways at his shelves.
Then the guy on the left shot his cuff and tapped the face of his watch and turned to leave. His partner straightened up and followed him. He trailed his hand over the nearest table and knocked a plate to the floor. It shattered on the tiles, loud and dissonant against the opera floating in the air. The sandy guy and the dark woman sat still and looked away. The two guys walked slowly to the door, heads up, confident. Reacher watched them all the way out to the sidewalk. Then the owner came out from behind the bar and knelt down and raked through the fragments of the broken plate with his fingertips.
`You OK?' Reacher called to him.
Soon as the words were out, he knew it was a dumb thing to say. The guy just shrugged and put an all-purpose miserable look on his face. He cupped his hands on the floor and started butting the shards into a pile. Reacher slid out of his chair and stepped away from the table and squared his napkin on the tile next to him and started collecting the debris into it. The couple five tables away were watching him.
`When are they coming back?' Reacher asked.
`An hour,' the guy said.
`How much do they want?'
The guy shrugged again and smiled a bitter smile.
`I get a start-up discount,' he said. `Two hundred a week, goes to four when the place picks up.'
`You want to pay?'
The guy made another sad face. `I want to stay in business, I guess. But paying out two bills a week ain't exactly going to help me do that.'
The sandy guy and the dark woman were looking at the opposite wall, but they were listening. The opera fell away to a minor-key aria and the diva started in on it with a low mournful note.
`Who were they?' Reacher asked quietly.
`Not Italians,' the guy said. `Just some punks.'
`Can I use your phone?'
The guy nodded.
`You know an office-supply store open late?' Reacher asked.
`Broadway, two blocks over,' the guy said. `Why? You got business to attend to?'
Reacher nodded.
`Yeah, business,' he said.
He stood up and slid around behind the bar. There was a new telephone next to a new reservations book. The book looked like it had never been opened. He picked up the phone and dialled a number and waited two beats until it was answered a mile away and forty floors up.
`Hello?' she said.
`Hey, Jodie,' he said.
`Hey, Reacher, what's new?'
`You going to be finished any time soon?'
He heard her sigh.
`No, this is an all-nighter,' she said. `Complex law, and they need an opinion like yesterday. I'm real sorry.'
`Don't worry about it,' he said. `I've got something to do. Then I guess I'll head back on up to Garrison.'
`OK, take care of yourself,' she said. `I love you.'
He heard the crackle of legal documents and the phone went down. He hung up and came out from behind the bar and stepped back to his table. He left forty dollars trapped under his espresso saucer and headed for the door.
`Good luck,' he called.
The guy crouched on the floor nodded vaguely and the couple at the distant table watched him go. He turned his collar up and shrugged down into his coat and left the opera behind him and stepped out to the sidewalk. It was dark and the air was chill with fall. Small haloes of fog were starting up around the lights. He walked east to Broadway and scanned through the neon for the office store. It was a narrow place packed with items marked with prices on large pieces of fluorescent card cut in the shape of stars. Everything was a bargain, which suited Reacher fine. He bought a small labelling machine and a tube of superglue. Then he hunched back down in his coat and headed north to Jodie's apartment.
His four-wheel drive was parked in the garage under her building. He drove it up the ramp and turned south on Broadway and west back to the restaurant. He slowed on the street and glanced in through the big windows. The place gleamed with halogen light on white walls and pale wood. No patrons. Every single table was empty and the owner was sitting on a stool behind the bar. Reacher glanced away and came around the block and parked illegally at the mouth of the alley that ran down toward the kitchen doors. He killed the motor and the lights and settled down to wait.
The dynamics of the city. The strong terrorize the weak. They keep on at it, like they always have, until they come up against somebody stronger with some arbitrary humane reason for stopping them. Somebody like Reacher. He had no real reason to help a guy he hardly knew. There was no logic involved. No agenda. Right then in a city of seven million souls there must be hundreds of strong people hurting weak people, maybe even thousands. Right then, at that exact moment. He wasn't going to seek them all out. He wasn't mounting any kind of a big campaign. But equally he wasn't about to let anything happen right under his nose. He couldn't just walk away. He never had.
He fumbled the label machine out of his pocket. Scaring the two guys away was only half the job. What mattered was who they thought was doing the scaring. A concerned citizen standing up alone for some restaurant owner's rights was going to cut no ice at all, no matter how effective that concerned citizen might be at the outset. Nobody is afraid of a lone individual, because a lone individual can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and anyway sooner or later a lone individual dies or moves away or loses interest. What makes a big impression is an organization. He smiled and looked down at the machine and started to figure out how it worked. He printed his own name as a test and pinched the tape off and inspected it. Reacher. Seven letters punched through in white on a blue plastic ribbon, a hair over an inch long. That was going to make the first guy's label about five inches long. And then about four, maybe four and a half for the second guy. Ideal. He smiled again and clicked and printed and laid the finished ribbons on the seat next to him. They had adhesive on the back under a peel-off paper strip, but he needed something better than that, which was why he had bought the superglue. He unscrewed the cap off the tiny tube and pierced the metal foil with the plastic spike and filled the nozzle ready for action. He put the cap back on and dropped the tube and the labels into his pocket. Then he got out of the car into the chill air and stood in the shadows, waiting.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.About the Author
I always loved entertainment, he says. At elementary school, I was always in the school plays. As a teenager, I worked in shoestring theaters and arts centers. I took vacation jobs anywhere there was a stage and an audience. I never intended to practice law. I did the degree because it was an interesting subject.
He joined Granada Television in Manchester, England, thinking the job would last a few months. He ended up staying nearly twenty years. He was there through the great era of British television drama, working on flagship shows like Brideshead Revisited, Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker.
That was a wonderful, wonderful job, he says. But eventually, twenty years is enough for anybody. And television is teamwork--I felt I wanted to get away from that and get closer to the audience, personally.
So he made the decision to become a novelist. I figured the novel is the purest form of entertainment, and certainly the closest I'd ever get to an audience...after all, a writer is literally one-on-one with the reader for hours and hours at a time.
But why would an Englishman write for America?
Two important reasons, he says. First, I've always been in love with the States. And second, one thing I learned over the years in television is you go where the audience is. And where's the biggest, most literate and most sophisticated audience for modern fiction? In the U.S., without a doubt. It's what I call the basketball theory. If I wanted to be a basketball player, I'd always be second-best if I stayed in Europe. I would need to go to the NBA in America to find out if I were any good. It's the same with fiction. You find the most demanding readers and you write for them.
Married to a New Yorker, Child had a head start. He knows America well, from years of visiting. And so far, he's doing fine. His novels Echo Burning, Running Blind, Killing Floor, Die Trying, Tripwire and Without Fail won awards and rave reviews coast to coast, from The New York Times to People. But best of all, the freedom to work wherever he wants means he's now realized a dream he cherished since childhood.
It's one of my earliest memories, he says. Imagine provincial England at the end of the Fifties. I was about four, and I went to the public library with my mother. There was a series of kids' books called My Home In... and the only one our library had was My Home In America. There were twelve pages, each with a big color illustration of a home ... there was a prairie farmhouse, a Californian bungalow, a New England Colonial ... and my favorite, a Manhattan apartment with a little boy sitting by the window, looking down at the city below. Right away, I knew I wanted to be that boy...
Now he is that boy. After years of dreaming, he moved to the U.S. in the summer of 1998. Writing has brought me a lot of rewards. But this is the best of all of them.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Product details
- ASIN : B0031RS4SO
- Publisher : Transworld Digital; 1st edition (4 September 2008)
- Language : English
- File size : 4704 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 516 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: 3,217 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Lee Child is one of the world’s leading thriller writers. He was born in Coventry, raised in Birmingham, and now lives in New York. It is said one of his novels featuring his hero Jack Reacher is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds. His books consistently achieve the number-one slot on bestseller lists around the world and have sold over one hundred million copies. Two blockbusting Jack Reacher movies have been made so far. He is the recipient of many awards, most recently Author of the Year at the 2019 British Book Awards. He was appointed CBE in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours.
Photography © Sigrid Estrada
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Top reviews from Australia
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Also, the "motive" angle. It reminded me of these works (not verbatim as I was in my teens when I read it)
Carella to journalist in cafe "these murders are personal". - big fan of Ed McBain :)
certainly THANK GOODNESS!!
Top reviews from other countries

I enjoyed the slight change and it was a nice change.
Lee Child's writing continues to bug me a bit, describing places far too much with far too much description. Characters having conversations that lead the plot nowhere and feel like filler.
But this can all be forgiven as this was the most interesting Reacher book yet that has me guessing until the end. Whenever there's intrigue and suspicion to be had, you're always guessing in your head who the villain might be but it wasn't too obvious at any point for me.

He is constantly outmaneuvered by the protagonist and the reader is constantly given (in italics) the thought process of the perp but as usual, Childs twists and turns the plot and is always two jumps ahead.
I would not dare to suggest this is the top Reacher novel but it's in there, swinging.


This is a poor offering from a normally excellent series with Jack Reacher. If written earlier in the Author's writings it would possibly explain its lack-lustre.
However, I believe, it does little for Child's reputation.
