Tripwire
Lee Child
 The story begins with a prologue explaining how a man named Hook Hobie had a secret to hide and had planned a careful escape route in case anyone ever got close to finding it out. Two stages, the threat and the reaction. Stage one, the threat, was the early-warning system of two particular locations, of concentric tripwires. The early warning tripwire was eleven thousand miles from home. The closer second tripwire was six thousand miles from home. Stage two, the response, was to run, to tie up loose ends, cash in, transfer assets. Over 30 years had made him feel almost safe, but sometimes he thought about the first tripwire call and sweated and planned. Then the two tripwire calls came on the same day. The second nearer tripwire came before the early warning one. Hobie abandoned his stage two response, to run, and 30 years of careful planning. The main story then begins with Jack Reacher being visited by a private detective called Costello. Costello is looking for Reacher, but Reacher lies and tells him he knows nothing of a Jack Reacher living or working in Key West—the Floridian setting for the book. Reacher manages to get out of Costello that he is looking for Reacher under orders from a client named Mrs. Jacob, although Reacher knows nobody who goes by that name. After Reacher manages to keep up the charade that he is not who he really is, Costello leaves. Later on Reacher is working his night job as a bouncer in a strip club when two men come looking for him. Once again, Reacher lies about his name and denies knowing anyone called Reacher, and after a short confrontation, the two men leave. Reacher goes to follow them but can’t find them among the winding side roads. He does, however, find a dead Costello with his fingertips cut off. Reacher gets a ride from a female co-worker with a Porsche that expertly and quickly drives him to Miami for a flight to New York to find out who this Costello was and why he was looking for Reacher. Reacher arrives in New York and begins his search for Mrs. Jacob and for more information on Costello. He manages to find the dead Costello's office, which has already been searched. Reacher gets the contact number and address from Mrs. Jacob’s office and arrives at a house on the Hudson River in upstate New York to a funeral for his old mentor and friend, Leon Garber. His daughter, Jodie Garber-Jacob is revealed to be the mysterious divorced Mrs. Jacob, a wealthy successful financial attorney, and the house where the funeral is held was Leon's, which he willed to Reacher. Together, Reacher and Jodie begin trying to uncover information on her father's last project, an investigation for the elderly Hobie parents on their missing-in-action military son, Hook Hobie. This leads to them getting attacked on several occasions by men sent out by Hobie. Reacher realizes he has to protect Jodie from these men, who also killed her investigator Costello. After one encounter, Reacher is able to take the hitmen's new SUV and everything in it. Reacher and Jodie then realize their long buried feelings for each other are romantic. The investigation takes them to the military Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, a special facility that handles forensic remains of soldiers. They discover that Hobie was drafted in the Vietnam War and was a skilled pilot who lost his hand when his helicopter went down. However, the truth that Hook Hobie is not who he says he is then found out, and it turns out that Hobie was actually a soldier named Carl Allen who stole Victor Hobie’s identity when the helicopter that Hobie was piloting was shot down; the helicopter having been sent with a crew to arrest Allen for fragging his commanding officer in the forest. Since the war, Allen has gathered a fortune as a moneylender, first as a street lender, then as a corporate "last-resort" lender for companies that are financially rejected by banks, a "high-end loan shark". His business method is the same though, whether a dark alley or corporate boardroom, terrorizing the clients with torture and killing of family if they default. The reason Allen didn't liquidate and run when his tripwires were triggered is because he has been plotting a takeover of a billion dollar company. Allen then kidnaps the owner of the company and his wife, Chester and Marilyn Stone, to speed up the process, blackmailing and torturing them to sign over all the shares. In the climax of the story, Reacher and Jodie end up in Allen's office with Chester and Marilyn. Reacher confronts Allen, leading to a gun fight between the two. Allen is killed, and Reacher sustains a bullet wound to the chest that should have killed him. A doctor explains that, due to how much exercise and physical labour he has done through his life, his pectoral muscle was so thick the bullet could only get to Reacher’s ribcage before stopping. The story ends with Reacher and Jodie visiting the real Victor Hobie’s parents and telling them how much of a good soldier he was.