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Lee Child Collection: Persuader / The Enemy
Two more novels from Lee Child's Jack Reacher series in one collection
Persuader
Jack Reacher. The ultimate loner. An elite ex-military cop who left the service years ago, he’s moved from place to place…without family…without possessions…without commitments. And without fear. Which is good, because trouble—big, violent, complicated trouble—finds Reacher wherever he goes. And when trouble finds him, Reacher does not quit, not once…not ever. But some unfinished business has now found Reacher. And Reacher is a man who hates unfinished business. Ten years ago, a key investigation went sour and someone got away with murder. Now a chance encounter brings it all back. Now Reacher sees his one last shot. Some would call it vengeance. Some would call it redemption. Reacher would call it…justice.
The Enemy
Jack Reacher. Hero. Loner. Soldier. Soldier’s son. An elite military cop, he was one of the army’s brightest stars. But in every cop’s life there is a turning point. One case. One messy, tangled case that can shatter a career. Turn a lawman into a renegade. And make him question words like honor, valor, and duty. For Jack Reacher, this is that case.… New Year’s Day, 1990. The Berlin Wall is coming down. The world is changing. And in a North Carolina “hot-sheets” motel, a two-star general is found dead. His briefcase is missing. Nobody knows what was in it. Within minutes Jack Reacher has his orders: Control the situation. But this situation can’t be controlled. Within hours the general’s wife is murdered hundreds of miles away. Then the dominoes really start to fall.… Two Special Forces soldiers—the toughest of the tough—are taken down, one at a time. Top military commanders are moved from place to place in a bizarre game of chess. And somewhere inside the vast worldwide fortress that is the U.S. Army, Jack Reacher—an ordinarily untouchable investigator for the 110th Special Unit—is being set up as a fall guy with the worst enemies a man can have. But Reacher won’t quit. He’s fighting a new kind of war. And he’s taking a young female lieutenant with him on a deadly hunt that leads them from the ragged edges of a rural army post to the winding streets of Paris to a confrontation with an enemy he didn’t know he had. With his French-born mother dying—and divulging to her son one last, stunning secret—Reacher is forced to question everything he once believed…about his family, his career, his loyalties—and himself. Because this soldier’s son is on his way into the darkness, where he finds a tangled drama of desperate desires and violent death—and a conspiracy more chilling, ingenious, and treacherous than anyone could have guessed.
Persuader
Jack Reacher. The ultimate loner. An elite ex-military cop who left the service years ago, he’s moved from place to place…without family…without possessions…without commitments. And without fear. Which is good, because trouble—big, violent, complicated trouble—finds Reacher wherever he goes. And when trouble finds him, Reacher does not quit, not once…not ever. But some unfinished business has now found Reacher. And Reacher is a man who hates unfinished business. Ten years ago, a key investigation went sour and someone got away with murder. Now a chance encounter brings it all back. Now Reacher sees his one last shot. Some would call it vengeance. Some would call it redemption. Reacher would call it…justice.
The Enemy
Jack Reacher. Hero. Loner. Soldier. Soldier’s son. An elite military cop, he was one of the army’s brightest stars. But in every cop’s life there is a turning point. One case. One messy, tangled case that can shatter a career. Turn a lawman into a renegade. And make him question words like honor, valor, and duty. For Jack Reacher, this is that case.… New Year’s Day, 1990. The Berlin Wall is coming down. The world is changing. And in a North Carolina “hot-sheets” motel, a two-star general is found dead. His briefcase is missing. Nobody knows what was in it. Within minutes Jack Reacher has his orders: Control the situation. But this situation can’t be controlled. Within hours the general’s wife is murdered hundreds of miles away. Then the dominoes really start to fall.… Two Special Forces soldiers—the toughest of the tough—are taken down, one at a time. Top military commanders are moved from place to place in a bizarre game of chess. And somewhere inside the vast worldwide fortress that is the U.S. Army, Jack Reacher—an ordinarily untouchable investigator for the 110th Special Unit—is being set up as a fall guy with the worst enemies a man can have. But Reacher won’t quit. He’s fighting a new kind of war. And he’s taking a young female lieutenant with him on a deadly hunt that leads them from the ragged edges of a rural army post to the winding streets of Paris to a confrontation with an enemy he didn’t know he had. With his French-born mother dying—and divulging to her son one last, stunning secret—Reacher is forced to question everything he once believed…about his family, his career, his loyalties—and himself. Because this soldier’s son is on his way into the darkness, where he finds a tangled drama of desperate desires and violent death—and a conspiracy more chilling, ingenious, and treacherous than anyone could have guessed.
- GenresThriller
MP3 CD
First published July 1, 2015
About the author
Lee Child
446 books35.1k followersLee Child was born October 29th, 1954 in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended. He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theater he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a presentation director during British TV's "golden age." During his tenure his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker. But he was fired in 1995 at the age of 40 as a result of corporate restructuring. Always a voracious reader, he decided to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis and bought six dollars' worth of paper and pencils and sat down to write a book, Killing Floor, the first in the Jack Reacher series.
Killing Floor was an immediate success and launched the series which has grown in sales and impact with every new installment. The first Jack Reacher movie, based on the novel One Shot and starring Tom Cruise and Rosamund Pike, was released in December 2012.
Lee has three homes—an apartment in Manhattan, a country house in the south of France, and whatever airplane cabin he happens to be in while traveling between the two. In the US he drives a supercharged Jaguar, which was built in Jaguar's Browns Lane plant, thirty yards from the hospital in which he was born.
Lee spends his spare time reading, listening to music, and watching the Yankees, Aston Villa, or Marseilles soccer. He is married with a grown-up daughter. He is tall and slim, despite an appalling diet and a refusal to exercise.
Killing Floor was an immediate success and launched the series which has grown in sales and impact with every new installment. The first Jack Reacher movie, based on the novel One Shot and starring Tom Cruise and Rosamund Pike, was released in December 2012.
Lee has three homes—an apartment in Manhattan, a country house in the south of France, and whatever airplane cabin he happens to be in while traveling between the two. In the US he drives a supercharged Jaguar, which was built in Jaguar's Browns Lane plant, thirty yards from the hospital in which he was born.
Lee spends his spare time reading, listening to music, and watching the Yankees, Aston Villa, or Marseilles soccer. He is married with a grown-up daughter. He is tall and slim, despite an appalling diet and a refusal to exercise.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 28, 2025
Persuader ⭐⭐
The novel opens with a dramatic triple axel, double toe loop, reverse spin, and a bonus layer of béchamel: Jack Reacher kills a police officer. Granted, he does so inadvertently while rescuing a young man from would-be abductors, but still—goddammit—Jack Reacher does not make mistakes, any more than raindrops fall upward. He never shoots the wrong man, not even if—hypothetically speaking—he had a nail lodged in his cranium (which, incidentally, did happen once upon a time, though not in this particular instance).
What in heaven's name has gone wrong with this universe? And, as if this were not calamitous enough, Reacher abandons the corpse and flees the scene with the would-be abductee in a van filled with pirated CDs (fortunately for him, he is not dark-skinned, lest some cop spot him mid-chorus). O Gods of Olympus, the world is thoroughly inverted: soon we shall be defecating through our mouths, and Time magazine will name Hitler ‘Man of the Year’—oh wait, it already did (1938).
Right, enough digression—time to proceed to the action.
Jack Reacher has taken on an undercover assignment, albeit in a freelance capacity, for two reasons: first, because a scoundrel murdered a promising young military police officer a decade ago (admittedly not the most original of motives, but we’ve encountered worse). Reacher, in an uncharacteristically self-restrained moment, abstained from sleeping with her—apologies, there's no less macho way to phrase that; we are, after all, discussing Reacher—in order not to derail her career trajectory. The second reason? Teresa. Who is Teresa? Of negligible importance narratively, but she has been kidnapped by the very same scoundrel who was supposed to be long deceased—having, a decade earlier, received two bullets to the skull from Reacher, who was functioning at the time as judge, jury, and executioner (he is not one for delegation; his management style is, shall we say, centralised).
SPOILER ALERT: Teresa is destined to be sold to swarthy men with dietary restrictions regarding pork.
SPOILER ALERT 2: The book operates within its usual register of mediocrity, but concludes on a particularly dismal narrative note. When one walks into a room soaked in the same waters one leapt into minutes earlier to escape an adversary (only to find said adversary once again before one) and utters, "I'm back," average rader expects something rather more theatrical to justify the line. Pressing a chisel into his skull, frankly, feels inadequate. (It’s akin to twisting the neighbour’s pigtails while shouting, “So you were the one who hung the laundry on the rooftop?!”) Had Reacher blown up the entire house while walking away without so much as a backward glance, I would have been far more appeased.
Truthfully, I do not know why I persist with this series, as the themes it traffics in are far removed from my literary predilections. And yet, I must confess, its sheer brainlessness offers a certain relief. One needn’t think—Reacher does the thinking for you. The moment he senses a gun aimed in his direction, within 7 nanoseconds he has calculated 27 possible countermeasures and selected the optimal one.
The Enemy ⭐⭐🌙
A shade better than the previous instalments (in my humble opinion, of course). Two and a half stars.
The Jack Reacher in this novel is not quite the rugged, itinerant alpha-male we've come to know — the drifting monolith whose mere presence seems to raise the humidity levels of any town he deigns to spend the night in. Chronologically, this book is set earlier than the others, during his active duty in the U.S. Army, still bearing the rank of Military Police Major. This may render him somewhat déclassé in the eyes of some readers — but the plot has its merits, even if it lacks the usual barrage of flying fists and broken jaws. (Perhaps due to the fact that, for once, he is part of the system he's usually tearing down.)
The story opens with Reacher being reassigned, somewhat mysteriously, from Panama back to the United States. Oddly enough, he soon discovers that around thirty other highly competent MPs have experienced similar “coincidental” transfers. (And given Reacher's evident respect for them, we may assume these are individuals who can shoe a flea, strip a tank in thirty seconds, and enjoy bacon while the pig is still squealing — in short, the cream of the crop.)
Tasked with uncovering the circumstances surrounding a general who perished in a $15 motel room — in flagrante delicto, no less, with a condom still in place — Reacher begins pulling at threads that swiftly unravel into a broader web of intrigue, cover-ups, and the occasional corpse.
A gay sergeant from Delta Force (the kind who could kill you with a look or hit you with a slingshot through reinforced concrete), the bereaved widow, a tank division general — they all cross paths with our taciturn Major.
As if that weren’t enough, Reacher’s immediate superior is, to put it bluntly, a complete imbecile.
Reacher, relentless as ever, pursues the case across continents: he even travels to Germany and buries his mother in France (where we catch a glimpse of young Joe Reacher). It’s only when he believes he has cracked the code and confronts the mastermind that he receives one of those delightful narrative slaps in the face — the kind that remind both protagonist and reader that one is not quite as clever as one thinks. I relished that moment.
The finale involves Abrams tanks and gunfire, and order is, more or less, restored. Reacher lands a few righteous punches — and then walks away.
Oh yes, and in case it wasn’t obvious: this is the novel where Jack leaves the army. But you probably knew that if you’ve read even a single book in the series.
SUMMARY: A diverting little thriller, entangled in U.S. military affairs. Not particularly groundbreaking (we're not in A Few Good Men territory), and a touch light on violence, but serviceable. At times it borders on verbose, though not quite as meandering as some of Child’s earlier works. Ideal beach read or dentist’s waiting room companion.
P.S. Of course he boneshawwwgs (or rather “play the military doctor”?) the statuesque black lieutenant assigned as his assistant. Honestly, was there ever any doubt?
The novel opens with a dramatic triple axel, double toe loop, reverse spin, and a bonus layer of béchamel: Jack Reacher kills a police officer. Granted, he does so inadvertently while rescuing a young man from would-be abductors, but still—goddammit—Jack Reacher does not make mistakes, any more than raindrops fall upward. He never shoots the wrong man, not even if—hypothetically speaking—he had a nail lodged in his cranium (which, incidentally, did happen once upon a time, though not in this particular instance).
What in heaven's name has gone wrong with this universe? And, as if this were not calamitous enough, Reacher abandons the corpse and flees the scene with the would-be abductee in a van filled with pirated CDs (fortunately for him, he is not dark-skinned, lest some cop spot him mid-chorus). O Gods of Olympus, the world is thoroughly inverted: soon we shall be defecating through our mouths, and Time magazine will name Hitler ‘Man of the Year’—oh wait, it already did (1938).
Right, enough digression—time to proceed to the action.
Jack Reacher has taken on an undercover assignment, albeit in a freelance capacity, for two reasons: first, because a scoundrel murdered a promising young military police officer a decade ago (admittedly not the most original of motives, but we’ve encountered worse). Reacher, in an uncharacteristically self-restrained moment, abstained from sleeping with her—apologies, there's no less macho way to phrase that; we are, after all, discussing Reacher—in order not to derail her career trajectory. The second reason? Teresa. Who is Teresa? Of negligible importance narratively, but she has been kidnapped by the very same scoundrel who was supposed to be long deceased—having, a decade earlier, received two bullets to the skull from Reacher, who was functioning at the time as judge, jury, and executioner (he is not one for delegation; his management style is, shall we say, centralised).
SPOILER ALERT: Teresa is destined to be sold to swarthy men with dietary restrictions regarding pork.
SPOILER ALERT 2: The book operates within its usual register of mediocrity, but concludes on a particularly dismal narrative note. When one walks into a room soaked in the same waters one leapt into minutes earlier to escape an adversary (only to find said adversary once again before one) and utters, "I'm back," average rader expects something rather more theatrical to justify the line. Pressing a chisel into his skull, frankly, feels inadequate. (It’s akin to twisting the neighbour’s pigtails while shouting, “So you were the one who hung the laundry on the rooftop?!”) Had Reacher blown up the entire house while walking away without so much as a backward glance, I would have been far more appeased.
Truthfully, I do not know why I persist with this series, as the themes it traffics in are far removed from my literary predilections. And yet, I must confess, its sheer brainlessness offers a certain relief. One needn’t think—Reacher does the thinking for you. The moment he senses a gun aimed in his direction, within 7 nanoseconds he has calculated 27 possible countermeasures and selected the optimal one.
The Enemy ⭐⭐🌙
A shade better than the previous instalments (in my humble opinion, of course). Two and a half stars.
The Jack Reacher in this novel is not quite the rugged, itinerant alpha-male we've come to know — the drifting monolith whose mere presence seems to raise the humidity levels of any town he deigns to spend the night in. Chronologically, this book is set earlier than the others, during his active duty in the U.S. Army, still bearing the rank of Military Police Major. This may render him somewhat déclassé in the eyes of some readers — but the plot has its merits, even if it lacks the usual barrage of flying fists and broken jaws. (Perhaps due to the fact that, for once, he is part of the system he's usually tearing down.)
The story opens with Reacher being reassigned, somewhat mysteriously, from Panama back to the United States. Oddly enough, he soon discovers that around thirty other highly competent MPs have experienced similar “coincidental” transfers. (And given Reacher's evident respect for them, we may assume these are individuals who can shoe a flea, strip a tank in thirty seconds, and enjoy bacon while the pig is still squealing — in short, the cream of the crop.)
Tasked with uncovering the circumstances surrounding a general who perished in a $15 motel room — in flagrante delicto, no less, with a condom still in place — Reacher begins pulling at threads that swiftly unravel into a broader web of intrigue, cover-ups, and the occasional corpse.
A gay sergeant from Delta Force (the kind who could kill you with a look or hit you with a slingshot through reinforced concrete), the bereaved widow, a tank division general — they all cross paths with our taciturn Major.
As if that weren’t enough, Reacher’s immediate superior is, to put it bluntly, a complete imbecile.
Reacher, relentless as ever, pursues the case across continents: he even travels to Germany and buries his mother in France (where we catch a glimpse of young Joe Reacher). It’s only when he believes he has cracked the code and confronts the mastermind that he receives one of those delightful narrative slaps in the face — the kind that remind both protagonist and reader that one is not quite as clever as one thinks. I relished that moment.
The finale involves Abrams tanks and gunfire, and order is, more or less, restored. Reacher lands a few righteous punches — and then walks away.
Oh yes, and in case it wasn’t obvious: this is the novel where Jack leaves the army. But you probably knew that if you’ve read even a single book in the series.
SUMMARY: A diverting little thriller, entangled in U.S. military affairs. Not particularly groundbreaking (we're not in A Few Good Men territory), and a touch light on violence, but serviceable. At times it borders on verbose, though not quite as meandering as some of Child’s earlier works. Ideal beach read or dentist’s waiting room companion.
P.S. Of course he boneshawwwgs (or rather “play the military doctor”?) the statuesque black lieutenant assigned as his assistant. Honestly, was there ever any doubt?
February 20, 2024
I've since stopped focusing on all the Lee Child books, as enjoyable as they are. The genre of Mitch Rapp and Jack Reacher, although suspenseful, researched, and clever, starts running together for me. That's for me. Organic chemistry and the various Dune books do too, much as I like them.
I like stories of internal government problems, and they are appropriate to the time as those problems are growing, not shrinking,
I like stories of internal government problems, and they are appropriate to the time as those problems are growing, not shrinking,
August 5, 2025
Lee Child is a winner at his range of writing and Jack Reacher his greatest asset. The book was equal to his other 'Jack Reacher" series in plot, descriptions, twists and insight intel.
The only con in all pros for reading it is that the descriptions tend to get lengthy and sometimes overloaded with information, either in surroundings or gunes descriprions.
Other than that, the book is wholesomely enjoyable and uputdownable.
The only con in all pros for reading it is that the descriptions tend to get lengthy and sometimes overloaded with information, either in surroundings or gunes descriprions.
Other than that, the book is wholesomely enjoyable and uputdownable.
February 16, 2021
Perhaps the introductory Reacher novel. Doesn't present him as the itinerant of the contemporary novels. It involves Reachers search for vengeance. In the middle of that he gets involved in investigation of a smuggling operation.
September 26, 2017
Listened to this on tape while driving easy to follow about jack reacher.
January 12, 2018
#7 -- Decent read (4 Stars)
#8 -- I really enjoyed this book except for all of the 'I said nothing. She said nothing'. That was annoying. I definitely recommend this book. (5 stars)
#8 -- I really enjoyed this book except for all of the 'I said nothing. She said nothing'. That was annoying. I definitely recommend this book. (5 stars)
May 3, 2021
Read sometime in the past
June 5, 2023
A fun book and different characters.
April 26, 2026
My favorite show is Reacher (with Alan Ritchson, not Tom Cruise), so it was quite enjoyable to read this (as there don’t seem to be new episodes on the horizon).
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews