Night School

Night School is the twenty first Jack Reacher novel from Lee Child, published in 2016. Like several of the late series novels, this one is set in Reacher’s earlier life as an Army major in the military police, before the events of the contemporary books. The novel opens in 1996. Reacher has just been awarded a Legion of Merit medal for his work on a previous case, and his reward is being sent to a school. A counterterrorism school, supposedly, run jointly between the FBI, the CIA, and the military. Reacher reports to the school expecting to spend his time bored in classrooms. What he finds is that the school is a cover. He is one of three men, one each from the FBI, the CIA, and the military, brought together to investigate a single intelligence intercept.

The intercept is short and unsettling. An American operative in Hamburg has met with a jihadist contact, and the contact has agreed to pay a hundred million dollars for what the American is selling. Whatever it is, the price tells the analysts that it is something serious enough to warrant the largest intelligence operation any of them has been involved in. Reacher, alongside FBI agent Casey Waterman and CIA officer Marian Sinclair, has to figure out who the American is, what he is selling, and how to stop the deal before it is concluded.

Lee Child uses the 1990s setting to dig into questions about the prehistory of the post September 11 security state. The intelligence cooperation that the modern FBI, CIA, and military take for granted was much weaker in 1996, and the institutional rivalries that complicate the investigation are part of the plot. Reacher’s outsider status as a military police officer who has no patience for bureaucratic territoriality makes him exactly the kind of investigator the situation needs and exactly the kind that the intelligence agencies do not want pointed at their own operatives.

For longtime Reacher fans, Night School is a strong entry. For new readers, it works as a standalone but rewards prior familiarity with the series.