High Heat recap

New York City, July 1977. Jack Reacher, sixteen years old and passing through on his own, sees a man beating a woman on a Greenwich Village street and stops it, hurting the man badly in the process. The man is Croselli, who runs the neighbourhood's rackets; the woman is Jill Hemingway, an FBI agent whose failed case against him wrecked her career. Reacher spends the evening with Chrissie, a student who drives him around a city he does not know, and then the power fails and New York goes dark, with looting and fires across the boroughs. Hemingway uses the blackout to go after the evidence in Croselli's office, and Reacher goes with her. Croselli, hunting the stranger who humiliated him, finds them there, and Reacher kills him. When the lights come back the neighbourhood is out from under him, and Reacher leaves the city unnoticed, with the army, the military police and a lifetime of drifting still ahead of him.

About this story: Jack Reacher is a former US Army military policeman who left the service and now drifts around America with no home, no luggage and no plans, walking into other people's trouble and dealing with it. This book is set long before any of that. It is a single night in New York City in July 1977, when Reacher was sixteen years old - a Marine's son raised on bases abroad, alone in the city for a day, with West Point ahead of him. Nothing else from the series is needed to follow it.

So far: Reacher, sixteen and on his own in New York on a hot July night, comes across a man beating a woman on a Greenwich Village street and steps in. He hurts the man enough to end it and walks away. The man is Croselli, who runs the neighbourhood's rackets and is not used to being touched; the woman is Jill Hemingway, an FBI agent whose case against Croselli collapsed and took her career with it. Reacher also falls in with Chrissie, a student with a car, and spends the evening being shown a city he has never seen. The city itself is on edge: a summer of heat, a serial killer the papers have made everyone afraid of, and a police force stretched thin. Croselli, who now knows there is a very large stranger loose in his streets, starts asking who he is.

So far: The power fails and the whole city goes dark. Looting and fires spread through the boroughs and the police effectively lose the streets. Hemingway sees the blackout as her one chance: what would prove Croselli's business is in his office, the alarms and lights are dead, and there will never be another night like it. Reacher, with nothing else to do and no intention of letting her try it alone, goes with her. Chrissie gets clear of the worst of it. Croselli, meanwhile, is out in the dark with his own men, protecting what is his and hunting the stranger who humiliated him, and the two searches converge on the same building.

So far: Hemingway and Reacher get into Croselli's office in the dark, and Croselli catches them there. The confrontation is settled in a blacked-out building with fists and a gun, and Reacher kills him. With Croselli dead the grip he had on the neighbourhood ends, and Hemingway is left with the outcome she had wanted for years, though not by any method she can write down. Chrissie is unhurt, and she and Reacher part as the strangers they were. When the lights come back on, Reacher walks out of the city as anonymously as he walked into it, sixteen years old, with the army, the military police and the drifting that follows all still in front of him.

Croselli is dead, killed by Reacher in his own blacked-out office after catching Hemingway and Reacher inside it. His hold on the neighbourhood dies with him, and Hemingway finally has the result she spent years failing to get, in a form no official report will account for cleanly. Chrissie comes through the night unhurt and goes back to her own life; she and Reacher part as what they were, two strangers who spent one interesting evening together. The power returns, and the blackout turns from a night people are living through into a story they tell. Reacher leaves New York the way he arrived, on his own and unremarked, with no charges, no consequences and nobody but Hemingway who knows exactly what he did, and goes back to his family and to the West Point process waiting for him in the autumn. The story closes as a piece of the character's prehistory: the first clear sight of the man the series' drifter becomes, at sixteen already deciding for himself what he will and will not walk past.