"Jack Reacher has extended his thumb and hit the pavement. His plan is to follow the autumn sun on an epic trip across America, from Maine to California. He doesn't get far. On a country road in rural New Hampshire, deep in the New England woods, he sees a sign to a place he has never been: The town where his father was born. He thinks, What's one extra day? and takes the detour. At the same moment, in the same isolated area, a car breaks down. Two...

"'Why is this town called Mother's Rest?' That's all Reacher wants to know. But no one will tell him. It's a tiny place hidden in a thousand square miles of wheat fields, with a railroad stop, and sullen and watchful people, and a worried woman named Michelle Chang, who mistakes him for someone else: her missing partner in a private investigation she thinks must have started small and then turned lethal. Reacher has no particular place to go, and...

"Reacher rides the bus north from Milwaukee. At a comfort stop in Wisconsin dairy country he takes a stroll. Among the cheap junk in a pawn shop window he notices a West Point class ring for sale. It's tiny. A woman cadet's ring. Why would she pawn it? Reacher knows what Serena Sanderson must have gone through to get it. He fights through a biker gang and a South Dakota gangster, following the trail of the ring to the emptiness of Wyoming, in search...