From hope to despair ? Two small towns in Colorado, between them nothing but 12 miles of empty road. All Jack Reacher wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets are four redneck deputies, a vagrancy charge and a trip back to the county line. Reacher doesn?t like being kicked out of town. He has no job, no address, no baggage. Nothing, except bloody-minded curiosity. And once he finds a little thread to pull, a shocking conspiracy starts to unravel ?.

Gerrardsville, Colorado. One tragic event. Two witnesses. Two conflicting accounts. One witness sees a woman throw herself in front of a bus - clearly suicide. The other witness is Jack Reacher. And he sees what really happened - a man in grey hoodie and jeans, swift and silent as a shadow, pushed the victim to her death before grabbing her bag and sauntering away. Reacher follows the killer on foot, not knowing that this was no random act of violence....

Reacher never backs down from a problem. And he's about to find a big one, on a deserted Arizona road, where a Jeep has crashed into the only tree for miles around. Under the merciless desert sun, nothing is as it seems. Minutes later Reacher is heading into the nearby border town, a backwater that has seen better days. Next to him is Michaela Fenton, an army veteran turned FBI agent, who is trying to find her twin brother. He might have got mixed...