Past Tense

By Lee Child

23rd in the Jack Reacher series. Walking cross-country toward San Diego, Reacher detours into Laconia, New Hampshire, after recognizing it as his late father's birthplace, and begins tracing family records that turn up no sign of the Reachers ever having lived within the city itself. In a separate thread, a young Canadian couple traveling to sell valuables in New York breaks down near an isolated motel, where a group of polished young hosts gradually restrict their movements, monitor their room, and select them as targets while claiming the phone and vehicles are all out of service. As Reacher's genealogical search leads him toward an outlying settlement connected to his family name, the couple's suspicion of their hosts grows alongside evidence that their room has been under covert surveillance from the start.

Description community-written - CC BY-SA 4.0.

Series

• Jack Reacher - book 23

Guides

• Chapter-by-chapter recap of Past Tense
• Past Tense character guide

Genres: action-adventure, mystery, thriller-suspense, war-military-fiction

Recordings