High Heat characters

Also known as Reacher

Appears from the start

Sixteen years old, already enormous and still growing, travelling on his own and stopping in New York City for a night in the summer of 1977. The son of a Marine, raised on bases around the world and schooled in fighting by his older brother and by circumstance, he has the West Point process ahead of him in the autumn. Literal-minded, curious about a city he does not know, and unable to walk past something he thinks is wrong, he intervenes when he sees a man beating a woman on a Greenwich Village street.

Appears from the start

A local mafia operator who runs loan-sharking, protection and the rest of the neighbourhood's rackets, and who is used to nobody in it crossing him. Reacher first sees him beating a woman in the street, and the beating stops only because Reacher stops it - a humiliation Croselli has no intention of leaving unanswered.

First appears in chapter 2

The woman Croselli was beating: an FBI agent whose career stalled when the case she built against him collapsed. Sidelined inside her own office and running out of chances, she is still working the man who ruined her, and a very large stranger who has just knocked him down in the street is the first help she has had in a long time.

First appears in chapter 4

A college student with a car who falls in with Reacher by chance and spends the evening showing him a city he has never seen. She takes him at face value, treats the night as an adventure, and is with him when the lights go out.