Here is the complete list of Jack Reacher books in order. Jack Reacher is the main character of a series of short stories, novella, and novels by British author Jim Grant, popularly known by his pen name, Lee Child.
Written in either first-person or third-person, Jack Reacher is a retired major in the United States Army Military Police Corps. The whole series revolves on Reacher getting involved with dangerous situations and odd jobs as he travels around the US.
Who Is Lee Child?
Born on October 29, 1954 in Coventry, England, Jim Grant– or better known as –Lee Child, is a well-known English thriller novelist. When he was four, his folks chose to make a transition to Handsworth Wood in Birmingham so Grant and his other siblings could get a more superior education.
Up till eleven years old, Lee went to the Orchard Primary School in Handsworth Wood where he was known to be a sharp kid. A few years later, Lee won a scholarship to the King Edward’s School, Birmingham, a similar school renowned essayists J.R.R. Tolkien and Enoch Powell attended.
Despite the fact that Lee never wanted to have a law career, he went to law school in 1974 at the Sheffield University in Sheffield. Because of his low interest in the profession, Lee worked part-time at a theatre while he’s in law school and joined a commercial television channel after graduation.
During his career at the Granada Television in Manchester, Lee wrote commercials and news stories, thousands of trailers, and was involved in more than 40,000 hours of programming on Granada Television.
It wasn’t until 1995 when Lee was forced to quit his job and therefore became a writer. In 1997, he published his first book, Killing Floor, the first novel in the Jack Reacher book series.
Jack Reacher Complete Book List and Summary
Here are all the Jack Reacher books in chronological order for anyone who wants to get started on the book series:
1) Killing Floor – 1997
Book Summary: THE FIRST JACK REACHER NOVEL
The bestselling novel featuring the “wonderfully epic hero”(People) who inspired the hit films Jack Reacher and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.Ex-military policeman Jack Reacher is a drifter. He’s just passing through Margrave, Georgia, and in less than an hour, he’s arrested for murder. Not much of a welcome. All Reacher knows is that he didn’t kill anybody. At least not here. Not lately. But he doesn’t stand a chance of convincing anyone. Not in Margrave, Georgia. Not a chance in hell.- Book Reviews:
2) Die Trying – 1998
Book Summary: Jack Reacher finds himself in bad company in the second novel in Lee Child’s New York Times bestselling series.Jack Reacher is an innocent bystander when he witnesses a woman kidnapped off a Chicago street in broad daylight. In the wrong place at the wrong time, he’s kidnapped with her. Chained together, locked in the back of a stifling van, and racing across America to an unknown destination for an unknown purpose, they’re at the mercy of a group of men demanding an impossible ransom. Because this mysterious woman is worth more than Reacher ever suspected. Now he has to save them both—from the inside out—or die trying…
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3) Tripwire: (Jack Reacher 3) – 1999
Book Summary: Jack Reacher hunts the hunter in the third novel in Lee Child’s New York Times bestselling series.Ex military policeman Jack Reacher is enjoying the lazy anonymity of Key West when a stranger shows up asking for him. He’s got a lot of questions. Reacher does too, especially after the guy turns up dead. The answers lead Reacher on a cold trail back to New York, to the tenuous confidence of an alluring woman, and the dangerous corners of his own past.
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4) The Visitor – 2000
Book Summary: Two women, victims of sexual harassment, left the army under dubious circumstances. Both are now dead. Jack Reacher knew them both. A perfect psychological match, he is arrested, but is released when another woman is murdered. Everyone fears a serial killer is on the loose and Reacher finds himself heavily involved in the investigation.
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5) Echo Burning – 2001
Book Summary: Jack Reacher finds trouble in Texas in the fifth novel in Lee Child’s New York Times bestselling series.
Thumbing across the scorched Texas desert, Jack Reacher has nowhere to go and all the time in the world to get there. Cruising the same stretch of two-lane blacktop is Carmen Greer. For Reacher, the lift comes with a hitch. Carmen’s got a wild story to tell—all about her husband, her family secrets, and a hometown that’s purely gothic. She’s also got a plan. Reacher’s part of it. And before the sun sets, this ride could cost them both their lives.
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6) Without Fail – 2002
Book Summary: Jack Reacher takes aim at the White House in the sixth novel in Lee Child’s New York Times bestselling series.
Skilled, cautious, and anonymous, Jack Reacher is perfect for the job: to assassinate the vice president of the United States. Theoretically, of course. A female Secret Service agent wants Reacher to find the holes in her system, and fast—because a covert group already has the vice president in their sights. They’ve planned well. There’s just one thing they didn’t plan on: Reacher.
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7) Persuader – 2003
Book Summary: “Gripping and suspenseful . . . Child ratchets up the suspense to new heights.”—The Denver PostJack Reacher lives for the moment. Without a home. Without commitment. And with a burning desire to right wrongs—and rewrite his own agonizing past. DEA Susan Duffy is living for the future, knowing that she has made a terrible mistake by putting one of her own female agents into a death trap within a heavily guarded Maine mansion.Staging a brilliant ruse, Reacher hurtles into the dark heart of a vast criminal enterprise. Trying to rescue an agent whose time is running out, Reacher enters a crime lord’s waterfront fortress. There he will find a world of secrecy and violence—and confront some unfinished business from his own past.Praise for Persuader“A page-turner . . . [Lee] Child’s tale drives hard and fast.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review“Wickedly addictive . . . so fast-paced it makes the eyeballs spin.”—Orlando Sentinel“A story that will sweep you along as fast as some of the riptides Reacher survives.”—St. Petersburg Times
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8) The Enemy – 2004
Book Summary: Jack Reacher. Hero. Loner. Soldier. Soldier’s son. An elite military cop, he was one of the army’s brightest stars. But in every cop’s life there is a turning point. One case. One messy, tangled case that can shatter a career. Turn a lawman into a renegade. And make him question words like honor, valor, and duty. For Jack Reacher, this is that case.New Year’s Day, 1990. The Berlin Wall is coming down. The world is changing. And in a North Carolina “hot-sheets” motel, a two-star general is found dead. His briefcase is missing. Nobody knows what was in it. Within minutes Jack Reacher has his orders: Control the situation. But this situation can’t be controlled. Within hours the general’s wife is murdered hundreds of miles away. Then the dominoes really start to fall.Two Special Forces soldiers—the toughest of the tough—are taken down, one at a time. Top military commanders are moved from place to place in a bizarre game of chess. And somewhere inside the vast worldwide fortress that is the U.S. Army, Jack Reacher—an ordinarily untouchable investigator for the 110th Special Unit—is being set up as a fall guy with the worst enemies a man can have.But Reacher won’t quit. He’s fighting a new kind of war. And he’s taking a young female lieutenant with him on a deadly hunt that leads them from the ragged edges of a rural army post to the winding streets of Paris to a confrontation with an enemy he didn’t know he had. With his French-born mother dying—and divulging to her son one last, stunning secret—Reacher is forced to question everything he once believed…about his family, his career, his loyalties—and himself. Because this soldier’s son is on his way into the darkness, where he finds a tangled drama of desperate desires and violent death—and a conspiracy more chilling, ingenious, and treacherous than anyone could have guessed.BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Lee Child’s Make Me.
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9) One Shot – 2005
Book Summary: Now a major motion pictureSix shots. Five dead. One heartland city thrown into a state of terror. But within hours the cops have it solved: a slam-dunk case. Except for one thing. The accused man says: You got the wrong guy. Then he says: Get Reacher for me. And sure enough, from the world he lives in—no phone, no address, no commitments–ex–military investigator Jack Reacher is coming. In Lee Child’s astonishing new thriller, Reacher’s arrival will change everything—about a case that isn’t what it seems, about lives tangled in baffling ways, about a killer who missed one shot–and by doing so give Jack Reacher one shot at the truth.…The gunman worked from a parking structure just thirty yards away–point-blank range for a trained military sniper like James Barr. His victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But why does Barr want Reacher at his side? There are good reasons why Reacher is the last person Barr would want to see. But when Reacher hears Barr’s own words, he understands. And a slam-dunk case explodes. Soon Reacher is teamed with a young defense lawyer who is working against her D.A. father and dueling with a prosecution team that has an explosive secret of its own. Like most things Reacher has known in life, this case is a complex battlefield. But, as always, in battle, Reacher is at his best.Moving in the shadows, picking his spots, Reacher gets closer and closer to the unseen enemy who is pulling the strings. And for Reacher, the only way to take him down is to know his ruthlessness and respect his cunning–and then match him shot for shot….
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10) The Hard Way: (Jack Reacher 10) – 2006
Book Summary: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Lee Child’s Bad Luck and Trouble.In Lee Child’s astonishing new thriller, ex–military cop Reacher sees more than most people would…and because of that, he’s thrust into an explosive situation that’s about to blow up in his face. For the only way to find the truth—and save two innocent lives—is to do it the way Jack Reacher does it best: the hard way….Jack Reacher was alone, the way he liked it, soaking up the hot, electric New York City night, watching a man cross the street to a parked Mercedes and drive it away. The car contained one million dollars in ransom money. And Edward Lane, the man who paid it, will pay even more to get his family back. Lane runs a highly illegal soldiers-for-hire operation. He will use any amount of money and any tool to find his beautiful wife and child. And then he’ll turn Jack Reacher loose with a vengeance—because Reacher is the best man hunter in the world.On the trail of a vicious kidnapper, Reacher is learning the chilling secrets of his employer’s past…and of a horrific drama in the heart of a nasty little war. He’s beginning to realize that Edward Lane is hiding something. Something dirty. Something big. But Reacher also knows this: he’s already in way too deep to stop now.
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11) Bad Luck and Trouble – 2007
Book Summary: From a helicopter high above the empty California desert, a man is sent free-falling into the night…. In Chicago, a woman learns that an elite team of ex–army investigators is being hunted down one by one…. And on the streets of Portland, Jack Reacher—soldier, cop, hero—is pulled out of his wandering life by a code that few other people could understand. From the first shocking scenes in Lee Child’s explosive new novel, Jack Reacher is plunged like a knife into the heart of a conspiracy that is killing old friends…and is on its way to something even worse.A decade postmilitary, Reacher has an ATM card and the clothes on his back—no phone, no ties, and no address. But now a woman from his old unit has done the impossible. From Chicago, Frances Neagley finds Reacher, using a signal only the eight members of their elite team of army investigators would know. She tells him a terrifying story—about the brutal death of a man they both served with. Soon Reacher is reuniting with the survivors of his old team, scrambling to raise the living, bury the dead, and connect the dots in a mystery that is growing darker by the day. The deeper they dig, the more they don’ t know: about two other comrades who have suddenly gone missing—and a trail that leads into the neon of Vegas and the darkness of international terrorism.For now, Reacher can only react. To every sound. Every suspicion. Every scent and every moment. Then Reacher will trust the people he once trusted with his life—and take this thing all the way to the end. Because in a world of bad luck and trouble, when someone targets Jack Reacher and his team, they’d better be ready for what comes right back at them…BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Lee Child’s Blue Moon.
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12) Nothing to Lose – 2008
Book Summary: Two small towns in the middle of nowhere: Hope and Despair. Between them, nothing but twelve miles of empty road. Jack Reacher can’t find a ride, so he walks. All he wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets are four hostile locals, a vagrancy charge, and an order to move on. They’re picking on the wrong guy.Reacher is a hard man. No job, no address, no baggage. Nothing at all, except hardheaded curiosity. What are the secrets that Despair seems so desperate to hide?
With just one ally—a mysterious woman cop from Hope—and many enemies, Reacher goes up against a whole town, hunting the rich man at its core, cracking open his terrifying agenda, asking the question: Who has the edge—a man with everything to gain, or a man with nothing to lose?
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13) Gone Tomorrow – 2009
Book Summary: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “High-powered, intricately wrought suspense.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times“Hold on tight. . . . This novel will give you whiplash as you rabidly turn pages. . . . May be [Lee Child’s] best.”—USA TodayNew York City. Two in the morning. A subway car heading uptown. Jack Reacher, plus five other passengers. Four are okay. The fifth isn’t. And if you think Reacher isn’t going to get involved . . . then you don’t know Jack.Susan Mark, the fifth passenger, had a big secret, and her plain little life was being watched in Washington, and California, and Afghanistan—by dozens of people with one thing in common: They’re all lying to Reacher. A little. A lot. Or just enough to get him killed. A race has begun through the streets of Manhattan, a maze crowded with violent, skilled soldiers on all sides of a shadow war. For Jack Reacher, a man who trusts no one and likes it that way, the finish line comes when you finally get face-to-face and look your worst enemy in the eye.“Propulsive . . . [Child is] an expert at ratcheting up tension.”—Los Angeles Times
“A top-notch thriller.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Edgy . . . thoroughly engrossing.”—The Miami Herald
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14) Worth Dying For – 2010
Book Summary: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Jack Reacher is the coolest continuing series character now on offer.”—Stephen King, in Entertainment Weekly
#1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child follows the electrifying 61 Hours with his latest Reacher thriller—a story that hits the ground running and then accelerates all the way to a colossal showdown.There’s deadly trouble in the corn country of Nebraska . . . and Jack Reacher walks right into it. First he falls foul of the Duncans, a local clan that has terrified an entire county into submission. But it’s the unsolved case of a missing child, already decades-old, that Reacher can’t let go.The Duncans want Reacher gone—and it’s not just past secrets they’re trying to hide. They’re awaiting a secret shipment that’s already late—and they have the kind of customers no one can afford to annoy. For as dangerous as the Duncans are, they’re just the bottom of a criminal food chain stretching halfway around the world.For Reacher, it would have made much more sense to keep on going, to put some distance between himself and the hard-core trouble that’s bearing down on him.For Reacher, that was also impossible.Worth Dying For is the kind of explosive thriller only Lee Child could write and only Jack Reacher could survive—a heart-racing page-turner no suspense fan will want to miss.
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15) 61 Hours – 2010
Book Summary: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • INCLUDES BONUS MATERIAL • “Reacher gets better and better. . . . [This is the] craftiest and most highly evolved of Lee Child’s electrifying Reacher books.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“Child is a superb craftsman of suspense, juggling several plots and keeping his herrings well-rouged. . . . Chances are you’ll want to seek out other Reacher adventures the moment you finish.”—Entertainment WeeklyA bus crashes in a savage snowstorm and lands Jack Reacher in the middle of a deadly confrontation. In nearby Bolton, South Dakota, one brave woman is standing up for justice in a small town threatened by sinister forces. If she’s going to live long enough to testify, she’ll need help. Because a killer is coming to Bolton, a coldly proficient assassin who never misses.Reacher’s original plan was to keep on moving. But the next 61 hours will change everything. The secrets are deadlier and his enemies are stronger than he could have guessed—but so is the woman he’ll risk his life to save.“Masterful . . . a tour-de-force of both structure and suspense.”—The Providence Journal
“Child keeps his foot hard on the throttle. . . . This is Child in top form, but isn’t he always?”—Booklist (starred review)
“Compulsively addictive [with] an explosive climax that will have you tearing out your hair until Reacher’s next appearance.”—The Miami Herald
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16) Second Son – 2011
Book Summary: Ever wondered what early experiences shaped Reacher’s explosive career as butt-kicker supreme, the one-man guided-missile battler for justice? In this original new story, Lee Child looks back on an incident in his hero Jack Reacher’s teenage years as the younger son of a tough career US Marine, on a faraway military base in the Pacific.
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Conclusion
Love these Jack Reacher books? If you are looking for another author, book series or even genre to read next then check out our collection of must reads here.
