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Bad Luck and Trouble
Cover of Bad Luck and Trouble
Bad Luck and Trouble
by Lee Child
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THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING JACK REACHER SERIES • The inspiration for season two of the hit streaming series Reacher!

“Electrifying . . . this series [is] utterly addictive.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

From a helicopter high above the California desert, a man is sent free-falling into the night. On the streets of Portland, Jack Reacher is pulled out of his wandering life and plunged into the heart of a conspiracy that is killing old friends . . . and the people he once trusted with his life.
Reacher is the ultimate loner—no phone, no ties, no address. But a woman from his old military unit has found him using a signal only the eight members of their elite team would know. Then she tells him a terrifying story about the brutal death of a man they both served with. Soon Reacher is reuniting with the survivors of his team, scrambling to unravel the sudden disappearance of two other comrades. But Reacher won’t give up—because in a world of bad luck and trouble, when someone targets Jack Reacher and his team, they’d better be ready for what comes right back at them.
THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING JACK REACHER SERIES • The inspiration for season two of the hit streaming series Reacher!

“Electrifying . . . this series [is] utterly addictive.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

From a helicopter high above the California desert, a man is sent free-falling into the night. On the streets of Portland, Jack Reacher is pulled out of his wandering life and plunged into the heart of a conspiracy that is killing old friends . . . and the people he once trusted with his life.
Reacher is the ultimate loner—no phone, no ties, no address. But a woman from his old military unit has found him using a signal only the eight members of their elite team would know. Then she tells him a terrifying story about the brutal death of a man they both served with. Soon Reacher is reuniting with the survivors of his team, scrambling to unravel the sudden disappearance of two other comrades. But Reacher won’t give up—because in a world of bad luck and trouble, when someone targets Jack Reacher and his team, they’d better be ready for what comes right back at them.
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Excerpts-
  • Chapter One Chapter One


    The man was called Calvin Franz and the helicopter was a Bell 222. Franz had two broken legs, so he had to be loaded on board strapped to a stretcher. Not a difficult maneuver. The Bell was a roomy aircraft, twin-engined, designed for corporate travel and police departments, with space for seven passengers. The rear doors were as big as a panel van's and they opened wide. The middle row of seats had been removed. There was plenty of room for Franz on the floor.

    The helicopter was idling. Two men were carrying the stretcher. They ducked low under the rotor wash and hurried, one backward, one forward. When they reached the open door the guy who had been walking backward got one handle up on the sill and ducked away. The other guy stepped forward and shoved hard and slid the stretcher all the way inside. Franz was awake and hurting. He cried out and jerked around a little, but not much, because the straps across his chest and thighs were buckled tight. The two men climbed in after him and got in their seats behind the missing row and slammed the doors.

    Then they waited.

    The pilot waited.

    A third man came out a gray door and walked across the concrete. He bent low under the rotor and held a hand flat on his chest to stop his necktie whipping in the wind. The gesture made him look like a guilty man proclaiming his innocence. He tracked around the Bell's long nose and got in the forward seat, next to the pilot.

    "Go," he said, and then he bent his head to concentrate on his harness buckle.

    The pilot goosed the turbines and the lazy whop-whop of the idling blade slid up the scale to an urgent centripetal whip-whip-whip and then disappeared behind the treble blast of the exhaust. The Bell lifted straight off the ground, drifted left a little, rotated slightly, and then retracted its wheels and climbed a thousand feet. Then it dipped its nose and hammered north, high and fast. Below it, roads and science parks and small factories and neat isolated suburban communities slid past. Brick walls and metal siding blazed red in the late sun. Tiny emerald lawns and turquoise swimming pools winked in the last of the light.

    The man in the forward seat said, "You know where we're going?"

    The pilot nodded and said nothing.

    The Bell clattered onward, turning east of north, climbing a little higher, heading for darkness. It crossed a highway far below, a river of white lights crawling west and red lights crawling east. A minute north of the highway the last developed acres gave way to low hills, barren and scrubby and uninhabited. They glowed orange on the slopes that faced the setting sun and showed dull tan in the valleys and the shadows. Then the low hills gave way in turn to small rounded mountains. The Bell sped on, rising and falling, following the contours below. The man in the forward seat twisted around and looked down at Franz on the floor behind him. Smiled briefly and said, "Twenty more minutes, maybe."

    Franz didn't reply. He was in too much pain.

    ***

    The Bell was rated for a 161-mph cruise, so twenty more minutes took it almost fifty-four miles, beyond the mountains, well out over the empty desert. The pilot flared the nose and slowed a little. The man in the forward seat pressed his forehead against the window and stared down into the darkness.

    "Where are we?" he asked.

    The pilot said, "Where we were before."

    "Exactly?"

    "Roughly."

    "What's below us now?"

    "Sand."

    "Height?"

    "Three thousand...

About the Author-
  • 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.
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    March 26, 2007
    At the start of bestseller Child's winning 11th Jack Reacher adventure (after The Hard Way
    ), the bad guys unceremoniously dump Calvin Franz, a former MP, from a Bell 222 helicopter "hree thousand feet above the desert floor." Trouble is, Franz was a member of the army's special investigation unit headed by Reacher—a one-time military cop who left the service to become a solitary drifter par excellence. A former colleague sends Reacher a coded SOS; the two rendezvous in L.A. and the game's afoot. More members of the band get back together, only to discover that Franz isn't the group's only casualty. As usual in Reacher's capers, practically nothing is what it seems, and the meticulously detailed route to the truth proves especially engrossing thanks to the joint efforts of this band of brothers (and two sisters). The author carefully delineates Reacher's erstwhile colleagues, their smart-ass banter masking an unspoken affection. The villains' comeuppance, a riveting eye-for-an-eye battle scene (hint: helicopter), is one of Child's more satisfying finales.

  • Publisher's Weekly

    June 25, 2007
    Child’s 11th Jack Reacher novel finds the ultraresourceful, live-by-his-wits loner out for revenge against an unknown foe who, for some reason, is bumping off the members of his old military police squad. As if this weren’t already the answer to a thriller fan’s prayer, narrator Dick Hill is back on board. With an adaptable voice that conveys intelligence and more than a hint of wise guy attitude, Hill is the go-to guy when it comes to hard-boiled action. He gets a fair share of it, with Child’s lean prose taking his hero and three other surviving squad members through a series of perilous encounters. Hill has already perfected the aural equivalent of Reacher’s cool cynicism. Taking on the new trio, he provides security expert Frances Neagley with a no-nonsense brusqueness, forensic accountant Karla Dixon with a slightly softer tone, and Dave O’Donnell gets a snooty, waspish delivery that’s just about right for a D.C. private eye who looks like an aging Ivy Leaguer but carries a switchblade and brass knuckles in his pocket. Simultaneous release with the Delacorte hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 26).

  • Library Journal

    Starred review from March 15, 2007
    Jack Reacher's past comes roaring back to life in Child's 11th page-turner. When Reacher withdraws money from an ATM, he discovers that his account has unexpectedly grown. The amount is a code that takes him to California, where a friend and former colleague from his military days tells him that another member of their former unit has been murdered. A group of people who could trust one another with their lives is now being picked off one by one. Can the remaining team members figure out who is after them and why they have been targeted? After ten previous Reacher novels, it would seem difficult to find new insight into such an enigmatic character, but Child supplies one of the best books in the series. This view into Reacher's past and the people he knew makes for an intriguing story line. Highly recommended for all fiction collections; newcomers to the series as well as dyed-in-the-wool Child fans will find lots to enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/07.]Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L.

    Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Booklist

    Starred review from February 15, 2007
    The latest Jack Reacher thriller marks a significant departure from the rest of the series. Former military policeman Reacher, now a wanderer without an address, a phone, or an e-mail, discovers that someone has deposited $1,030 in his bank account and quickly deduces (1030 is the MP's code for urgent assistance needed) that the money represents a call for help from Frances Neagley, a sergeant in Reacher's old "special investigators" unit. Four members of the unit have been killed, and Neagley is rounding up the survivors to avenge their colleagues and, thus, live up to the group's motto: "You don't mess with the special investigators." There's a " Magnificent Seven "aspect to this scenario: bad stuff is happening to good people, and the old gang is rounded up to set things straight. Crime writers like to dust off this premise occasionally, usually as a way to bring back characters from earlier books (Robert B. Parker did it in " Potshot," 2001), and Child works that angle effectively. But there's more going on here than a class reunion. Readers know Reacher only as a loner, a tough guy with his own agenda who falls into stranger's problems, solves them, and moves on, Shane-like. But here we see him functioning as part of a team, almost an organization man, and it reveals new and fascinating aspects to his character. But, as always, the action is intense, the pace unrelenting, and the violence unforgiving. Child remains the reigning master at combining breakneck yet brilliantly constructed plotting with characters who continually surprise us with their depth.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)

  • Library Journal, starred review

    "Highly recommended ... One of the best books in the series."

  • Rocky Mountain News "It's easy to mock the testosterone of Reacher novels--until you read one. They're everything authors like WEB Griffin wish they had the talent to write."
  • Palm Beach Post, Florida "Reacher thinks and acts in nouns and verbs--no adjective need apply. He's a human missile; all you have to do is aim him."
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