#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Don’t miss the hit streaming series Reacher !  “The best one yet.”—Stephen King   Someone has tried to kill the French president. How many snipers can shoot from three-quarters of a mile with total confidence? John Kott—a U.S. Army marksman gone bad—is one of them. After fifteen years in prison, he’s out . . . and there’s a G8 summit coming up, packed with enough world leaders to tempt any assassin. If anyone can stop Kott, it’s the man who beat him before: Jack Reacher. And though he’d rather work alone, Reacher is teamed with rookie analyst Casey Nice. They’re facing a rough road, full of local thugs, double-crosses, and no backup if things go wrong. Reacher never gets too close. But this time it’s personal.   This edition includes the bonus short story “Not a Drill.” “Reacher is the stuff of myth, a great male fantasy. . . . One of this century’s most original, tantalizing pop-fiction heroes . . . [Lee] Child does a masterly job of bringing his adventure to life with endless surprises and fierce suspense.” —The Washington Post   “Yet another satisfying page-turner.” —Entertainment Weekly “Reacher is always up for a good fight, most entertainingly when he goes mano a mano with a seven-foot, 300-pound monster of a mobster named Little Joey. But it’s Reacher the Teacher who wows here.” —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times “Jack Reacher is today’s James Bond, a thriller hero we can’t get enough of. I read every one as soon as it appears.” —Ken Follett   “Reacher’s just one of fiction’s great mysterious strangers.” — Maxim “If you like fast-moving thrillers, you’ll want to take a look at this one.” —John Sandford “Fans won’t be disappointed by this suspense-filled, riveting thriller.” — Library Journal (starred review) “Child is the alpha dog of thriller writers, each new book zooming to the top of best-seller lists with the velocity of a Reacher head butt.” — Booklist “Every Reacher novel delivers a jolt to the nervous system.” — Kirkus Reviews Praise for the Jack Reacher series “The truth about Reacher gets better and better. . . . This series [is] utterly addictive.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Jack Reacher is today’s James Bond, a thriller hero we can’t get enough of. I read every one as soon as it appears.” —Ken Follett “Reacher is the stuff of myth. . . . One of this century’s most original, tantalizing pop-fiction heroes.” —The Washington Post “I’m a fan.” —James Patterson “The Reacher novels are easily the best thriller series going.” —NPR “Reacher is a man for whom the phrase moral compass was invented: His code determines his direction. . . . You need Jack Reacher.” — The Atlantic “I pick up Jack Reacher when I’m in the mood for someone big to solve my problems.” —Patricia Cornwell   “[A] feverishly thrilling series . . . You can always count on furious action.” — Miami Herald 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. Chapter 1   Eight days ago my life was an up and down affair. Some of it good. Some of it not so good. Most of it uneventful. Long slow periods of nothing much, with occasional bursts of something. Like the army itself. Which is how they found me. You can leave the army, but the army doesn’t leave you. Not always. Not completely.   They started looking two days after some guy took a shot at the president of France. I saw it in the paper. A long--range attempt with a rifle. In Paris. Nothing to do with me. I was six thousand miles away, in California, with a girl I met on a bus. She wanted to be an actor. I didn’t. So after forty--eight hours in LA she went one way and I went the other. Back on the bus, first to San Francisco for a couple of days, and then to Portland, Oregon, for three more, and then onward to Seattle. Which took me close to Fort Lewis, where two women in uniform got out of the bus. They left an Army Times behind, one day old, right there on the seat across the aisle.   The Army Times is a strange old paper. It started up before World War Two and is still going strong, every week, full of yesterday’s news and sundry how--to articles, like the headline staring up at me right then: New Rules! Changes for Badges and Insignia! Plus Four More Uniform Changes On The Way! Legend has it the news is yesterday’s because it’s copied secondhand from old AP summaries, but if you read the words sideways you sometimes hear a real sardonic tone between the lines. The editorials are occasionally brave. The obituaries are occasionally interesting.   Which was my sole reason for picking up the paper. Sometimes