de Lee Child
“Reacher gets better and better. . . . [This is the] craftiest and most highly evolved of Lee Child’s electrifying Reacher books.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
A bus crashes in a savage snowstorm and lands Jack Reacher in the middle of a deadly confrontation. In nearby Bolton, South Dakota, one brave woman is standing up for justice in a small town threatened by sinister forces. If she’s going to live long enough to testify, she’ll need help. Because a killer is coming to Bolton, a coldly proficient assassin who never misses.
Reacher’s original plan was to keep on moving. But the next 61 hours will change everything. The secrets are deadlier and his enemies are stronger than he could have guessed—but so is the woman he’ll risk his life to save.
“Reacher gets better and better. . . . [This is the] craftiest and most highly evolved of Lee Child’s electrifying Reacher books.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
A bus crashes in a savage snowstorm and lands Jack Reacher in the middle of a deadly confrontation. In nearby Bolton, South Dakota, one brave woman is standing up for justice in a small town threatened by sinister forces. If she’s going to live long enough to testify, she’ll need help. Because a killer is coming to Bolton, a coldly proficient assassin who never misses.
Reacher’s original plan was to keep on moving. But the next 61 hours will change everything. The secrets are deadlier and his enemies are stronger than he could have guessed—but so is the woman he’ll risk his life to save.
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Prix remportés-
- Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement Award
Crime Writers’ Association - Romantic Times Career Achievement Award Winner
Romantic Times BOOKreviews Magazine - The New York Times Best Seller List
The New York Times
Extraits-
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Chapter One Chapter One
Five minutes to three in the afternoon. Exactly sixty-one hours before it happened. The lawyer drove in and parked in the empty lot. There was an inch of new snow on the ground, so he spent a minute fumbling in the foot well until his overshoes were secure. Then he got out and turned his collar up and walked to the visitors’ entrance. There was a bitter wind out of the north. It was thick with fat lazy flakes. There was a storm sixty miles away. The radio had been full of it.
The lawyer got in through the door and stamped the snow off his feet. There was no line. It was not a regular visiting day. There was nothing ahead of him except an empty room and an empty X-ray belt and a metal detector hoop and three prison guards standing around doing nothing. He nodded to them, even though he didn’t know them. But he considered himself on their side, and they on his. Prison was a binary world. Either you were locked up, or you weren’t. They weren’t. He wasn’t.
Yet.
He took a gray plastic bin off the top of a teetering stack and folded his overcoat into it. He took off his suit coat and folded it and laid it on top of the overcoat. It was hot in the prison. Cheaper to burn a little extra oil than to give the inmates two sets of clothes, one for the summer and one for the winter. He could hear their noise ahead of him, the clatter of metal and concrete and the random crazy yells and the screams and the low grumble of other disaffected voices, all muted by doglegged corridors and many closed doors.
He emptied his pants pockets of keys, and wallet, and cell phone, and coins, and nested those clean warm personal items on top of his suit coat. He picked up the gray plastic bin. Didn’t carry it to the X-ray belt. Instead he hefted it across the room to a small window in a wall. He waited there and a woman in uniform took it and gave him a numbered ticket in exchange for it.
He braced himself in front of the metal detector hoop. He patted his pockets and glanced ahead, expectantly, as if waiting for an invitation. Learned behavior, from air travel. The guards let him stand there for a minute, a small, nervous man in his shirt sleeves, empty-handed. No briefcase. No notebook. Not even a pen. He was not there to advise. He was there to be advised. Not to talk, but to listen, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to put what he heard anywhere near a piece of paper.
The guards beckoned him through. A green light and no beep, but still the first guard wanded him and the second patted him down. The third escorted him deeper into the complex, through doors designed never to be open unless the last and the next were closed, and around tight corners designed to slow a running man’s progress, and past thick green glass windows with watchful faces behind.
The lobby had been institutional, with linoleum on the floor and mint green paint on the walls and fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. And the lobby had been connected to the outside, with gusts of cold air blowing in when the door was opened, and salt stains and puddles of snowmelt on the floor. The prison proper was different. It had no connection to the outside. No sky, no weather. No attempt at décor. It was all raw concrete, already rubbed greasy where sleeves and shoulders had touched it, still pale and dusty where they hadn’t. Underfoot was grippy gray paint, like the floor of an auto enthusiast’s garage. The lawyer’s overshoes squeaked on it.
There were four interview rooms. Each was a windowless concrete cube divided exactly in half by a wall-to-wall desk-height counter with safety glass...
Au sujet de l’auteur-
- Lee Child is the author of more than two dozen New York Times bestselling Jack Reacher thrillers, with most having reached the #1 position, and the #1 bestselling complete Jack Reacher story collection, No Middle Name. Foreign rights in the Reacher series have sold in one hundred territories. A native of England and a former television director, Lee Child lives in New York City and Wyoming.
Critiques-
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March 1, 2010
After a brief stop in New York City (Gone Tomorrow
), Jack Reacher is back in his element—Smalltown, U.S.A.—in bestseller Child's fine 14th thriller to feature the roving ex-military cop. When a tour bus on which he bummed a ride skids off the road and crashes, Reacher finds himself in Bolton, S.Dak., a tiny burg with big problems. A highly sophisticated methamphetamine lab run by a vicious Mexican drug cartel has begun operating outside town at an abandoned military facility. After figuring out the snow-bound, marooned Reacher's smart, great with weapons, and capable of tapping military intelligence, the helpless local cops enlist his assistance, and, as always, he displays plenty of derring-do, mental acuity, and good old-fashioned decency. While the action is slower than usual, series fans will appreciate some new insights that Child provides into his hero's psyche and background as well as a cliffhanger ending. Author tour. -
June 28, 2010
Narrator Dick Hill has been perfecting Reacher's hard-boiled verbal swagger for years. In this installment, Reacher is stranded in a snow-bound South Dakota town where a biker gang has turned an abandoned facility into a meth lab. A member of the gang is in prison awaiting trial, and a hit man has been hired to remove the only witness to the crime, a 70-something librarian. According to a curious stipulation, every time the prison's trouble gong sounds every policeman in town must report there immediately—even if it means leaving the sweet old librarian to the mercy of the unknown assassin. Happily, none of these convolutions give Hill pause. It's his job to entertain, and that he does, almost chuckling as he describes Reacher's takedown of two giant bikers, relishing the hero's heralded powers of observation, or summoning up a large, accented ration of nastiness for the villain of the piece, a diminutive Mexican crime boss named Plato. When the book finally arrives at the end of its 61-hour countdown, thanks to Hill the time seems to have been well spent. A Delacorte hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 1). -
Starred review from April 15, 2010
When a bus full of seniors spins out of control, the obvious recourse is to reach out for Reacher (Gone Tomorrow, 2009, etc.).
On its way to Mt. Rushmore, a bus carrying a load of elderly tourists, plus a ringer, loses to a patch of ice. Reacher's the ringer. Some 30 years younger than the average age of his fellow passengers, he's among them by happenstance, a kind of hitchhiker. Reacher—that inveterate nomad, indefatigable Rambo and Galahad for all seasons—finds himself once more in the midst of an authentic mess. Banged up and inoperable, the bus has come to rest in Bolton, S.D., a town buried in snow and heaps of trouble. There's the biker gang living on its outskirts, making crystal meth. There's a repellent figure named Plato, a racketeering lowlife, whose philosophy is kill everything on the theory that if it lives, whatever it is, it might at some point have a negative Platonic effect. And then there's grandmotherly Janet Salter. Sweet, smart, elegant and pound for pound as brave as Reacher, she's a retired librarian, from Oxford's Bodleian, no less. She's also a witness to a grisly murder. Desperate to keep her alive, the Bolton PD has begun to think it might not be able to. Andrew Peterson, the department's deputy chief, wants to ask Reacher for help. And when his reluctant boss asks why, he says,"I think he's the sort of guy who sees things five seconds before the rest of the world." Well, he's right about that, of course, but even Reacher will be shaken by some of what he sees before exiting Bolton en route to Nowhere, his country of choice.
In his 14th outing, implausible, irresistible Reacher remains just about the best butt-kicker in thriller-lit.(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
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Starred review from March 15, 2010
Large and deadly, footloose former army major Jack Reacher returns in his 14th outing (after "Gone Tomorrow"). This time, the retired military cop gets stranded by a ferocious blizzard in the town of Bolton, SD. Reacher has to deal with a hired assassin, a prison breakout, a mob of biker thugs, a secret government installation, a clutch of senior citizen tourists who thought a frigid vacation in South Dakota would save money, and a witness who needs protection from a murderous drug lord from Mexico. Just an ordinary day on the job for Reacher as the "61 hours" count down to an exciting climax. VERDICT Child's protagonist is a wandering knight who always finds trouble and inevitably solves it, with satisfying violence. As usual, Child's writing is superb. Not only is this thriller believable, but the descriptions of the blizzard will make readers want to hug their furnaces. Fast paced and exciting, this is highly recommended for thriller fans. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 1/10; library marketing.]Robert Conroy, Warren, MICopyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from February 15, 2010
Coming off Gone Tomorrow (2009), one of the very best among his 13 high-octane thrillers, Child keeps his foot hard on the throttle. Theres always a ticking clock in the background whenever our off-the-grid hero, Jack Reacher, finds a wrong that needs righting, but this time the clock drives the narrative. When a lawyer arrives at a South Dakota prison to visit a client, were told that its five minutes to three in the afternoon, exactly 61 hours before it happened. Meanwhile, Reacher wakes up from a nap to discover that the tour bus on which hes cadged a ride is spinning out of control on an icy bridge. By the time he helps the injured senior citizens aboard the bus, there are 59 hours left. But we still dont know what were waiting for. The clock continues to tick as Reacher, now without a ride, lands in Boulton, South Dakota, and finds himself helping out the local police as they attempt to protect a key witness in an upcoming drug trial. Then theres the matter of the peculiar underground installation outside of town, formerly a military outpost but now apparently housing a meth lab. As the hours fall away and the tension builds, we learn more about the installation, the local cops, and a Mexican drug lord whose own clock is ticking in sync with Reachers, but were still not prepared for what happens when the sixty-first hour arrives. One expects a novel organized around a clock to be plot driven, and thats certainly true here. But, as always, Child delivers enough juicy details about the landscape, the characters, and Reachers idiosyncrasies to give the story texture and to lower our pulse rates, if only momentarily. Even without the apparently game-changing finale, this is Child in top form, but isnt he always?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.) - Library Journal (starred review) "As usual, Child's writing is superb. Not only is this thriller believable, but the descriptions of the blizzard will make readers want to hug their furnaces. Fast paced and exciting, this is highly recommended for thriller fans."
- Madison County Herald "Get prepared for teeth-chattering suspense....Child sets up one of his most ingenious plots in the Jack Reacher chronicles. A fiery finale will leave fans talking and speculating for weeks to come."
- Miami Herald "Child deepens the mystery considerably, providing an explosive climax that will have you tearing out your hair until Reacher's next appearance."
- Romantic Times Book Review "Once again, Child spins a riveting, ticking-clock Jack Reacher adventure....It's guarantees you'll finish this one in less than 61 hours--and the jolter conclusion will shock and awe you."
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