The Enemy

The Enemy is the eighth Jack Reacher novel from Lee Child but the first chronologically in the Reacher timeline. Published in 2004, the book takes Reacher back to 1990, when he was still a major in the Army’s military police, stationed at Fort Bird in North Carolina. The novel opens on New Year’s Eve as Reacher takes command of the post and discovers within hours that a two star general has been found dead in a roadside motel, of apparent natural causes, with his briefcase mysteriously missing from the scene.

What looks at first like a simple matter of decorum, get the briefcase back to the family before the press gets hold of the embarrassment, slowly unfolds into something much larger. The general’s wife is murdered the same night. A pattern of strange transfers and assignments starts to surface inside the upper ranks. And Reacher, working with his older partner Sergeant Frances Neagley, has to figure out what is being covered up before the cover up reaches him.

The Cold War framing is what makes The Enemy distinctive among the Reacher novels. The Berlin Wall has just come down. The Soviet Union is in its final months. The American military is about to be reshaped by the end of the threat that justified its size, and a lot of senior officers are about to lose the careers they thought they had locked in. Lee Child uses this transitional moment with real intelligence. The villains have institutional motives that fit the historical setting precisely, and Reacher’s outsider status as a military police officer who refuses to play the careerist game makes him exactly the wrong man to be assigned to a case the brass wants buried.

For readers who enjoyed the contemporary Reacher novels and want to see his earlier life, The Enemy is essential. It also stands on its own and is one of the strongest entries in the entire series.