Gone Tomorrow

Plot summary

It's 2am, and Jack Reacher is travelling on the New York City Subway. He notices a suspicious looking passenger who matches many of the specifications for a potential suicide bomber. When he approaches her with an offer of assistance she shoots herself.

NYPD are eager to close the file without investigating the tragedy, but Reacher has other ideas. He wants to know what happened that night, and, more importantly, why. Is everyone as honest as they claim to be? And if so, then why are there so many questions to be asked and avoided?

Reacher is repeatedly and emphatically warned off the case, but his guilt over possibly triggering the poor woman's suicide won't let him rest until he has pursued the mystery all the way to the very end. In a world gone grey with moral and ethical relativism only Jack Reacher stubbornly sticks to his high standards no matter what the personal cost.

Critical reception

Gone Tomorrow has the switchback plotting and frictionless prose that are Child's trademarks. Unlike most of the series, though, it's narrated by Reacher himself. His lone-wolf habits and brusque, technophobic decodings of the world are always a pleasure, though how he maintains fighting fitness on a diet of pancakes, bacon and coffee is one of the world's great mysteries.

—John O'Connell, The Guardian

Gone Tomorrow has a surprisingly retro flavour, captured in Reacher's line "roll the clock back". The narrative works its way back through history in search of answers to the problems of the present. And there is something nostalgically neolithic about Reacher himself, a nomadic hunter-gatherer who can only be stopped by an anaesthetic dart-gun originally aimed at gorillas.

—Andy Martin, The Independent