The Midnight Line

The Midnight Line is the twenty second Jack Reacher novel from Lee Child, published in 2017. Reacher is in Wisconsin, where he has just gotten off a bus to stretch his legs, when he sees a small West Point class ring in the window of a pawnshop. The ring is a graduation ring from 2005, and the size suggests it belonged to a woman. Reacher, a West Point graduate himself, knows what those rings cost in pride and pain to earn. He buys it, intending to find the original owner and return it.

The trail leads through a chain of low end pawnshops and a network of biker gangs into the empty country of Wyoming, where the original owner of the ring has disappeared into a corner of the opioid crisis that has been quietly devastating veterans and rural communities. Lee Child handles this material with more care than thriller readers might expect. The Midnight Line is one of the more politically engaged Reacher books, dealing directly with the way the country has failed its returning soldiers and the way the addiction crisis has been allowed to fester in places that do not get television coverage.

Reacher is the same Reacher he has always been. Six foot five, ex military police, no luggage, no permanent address, and a willingness to handle situations with whatever force the situation calls for. What changes from book to book is the world he steps into, and Wyoming in 2017 is a particularly bleak version of America. Child writes the action sequences with the precision his readers expect, but the heart of the book is in the quieter scenes, where Reacher has to talk with people whose lives have been broken by something larger than any one villain he can punch.

For longtime Reacher fans, this is one of the better late entries in the series. For new readers, it works as a standalone.