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Authors: Lee Child

Second Son

BOOK: Second Son
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Praise for
#1 Bestselling author Lee Child and his Reacher Series

“Lee Child [is] the current poster-boy of American crime fiction.”


Los Angeles Times

“Jack Reacher is a tough guy’s tough guy.”


Santa Monica Mirror

“Like his hero Jack Reacher, Lee Child seems to make no wrong steps.”


Associated Press

“Jack Reacher is one of the best thriller characters at work today.”


Newsweek

“Reacher is Marlowe’s literary descendant, and a 21
st
-century knight—only tougher.”


Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Child has long been one of the best contemporary thriller writers.”


The Daily Beast

That this Reacher is so effortlessly larger than life is evidence of how intense the overall series has become.”

—Janet Maslin,
The New York Times

“No one kicks butt as entertainingly as Reacher.”


Kirkus Reviews

Praise for
WORTH DYING FOR

“At times here, he channels Hemingway, which makes a certain sense, since Reacher is nothing if not a chiseled Hemingway hero without the self-pity. He still channels the tough-guy prose as well as anybody alive.… This series is as good as pop fiction gets.”


Miami Herald

“A master craftsman of action thrillers. More than just compulsively readable, Mr. Child’s work shows a perfectly-fashioned understanding of his protagonist, dogged and moralistic. Reacher may get old some time, but he’s sure not showing any signs of it.”


The Wall Street Journal

“Don’t pick up the latest Jack Reacher novel if you don’t have some time on your hands, because
Worth Dying For
is difficult to put down.… Child manages to get an amazing amount of suspense into the novel.”


Associated Press

Praise for
61 HOURS

“Child’s writing is superb. Not only is this thriller believable, but the descriptions of the blizzard will make readers want to hug their furnaces. Fast paced and exciting, this is highly recommended for thriller fans.”


Library Journal
(starred review)

“Child keeps his foot hard on the throttle.… As always, Child delivers enough juicy details about the landscape, the characters, and Reacher’s idiosyncrasies to give the story texture and lower our pulse rates, if only momentarily.… This is Child in top form, but isn’t he always?”


Booklist
(starred review)

“Jack Reacher is much more like the heir to the Op and Marlowe than Spenser ever was.… Reacher is as appealingly misanthropic as ever.”


Esquire

Praise for
GONE TOMORROW

“Hold on tight. This is No. 13 in Lee Child’s action-packed series starring ex-military cop / pit bull Jack Reacher, and it may be the best.… this novel will give you whiplash as you rabidly turn pages, packed with layers of intrigue, murder, deceit and mystery.”


USA Today

“Thriller fans like books that start on the first page. This newest page-turner from Lee Child starts with the first sentence.… Child really is that good at heroic suspense writing.”


The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Child is famous for his can’t-catch-your-breath openings, and
Gone Tomorrow
features one of his most provocative … edgy, nerve-wracking and thoroughly engrossing,
Gone Tomorrow
is so insanely fast paced that it’s simply over too soon.”


The Miami Herald

Praise for
NOTHING TO LOSE

“Electrifying … utterly addictive … dazzles. Not for nothing has the cover art of his recent books depicted a bull’s-eye.”


The New York Times

“Explosive and nearly impossible to put down.”


People
, “Sizzling Summer Reads”

“Child’s hard-boiled meal ticket shows no signs of drying up anytime soon. Thank goodness.”


Entertainment Weekly
(A-)

Praise for
BAD LUCK AND TROUBLE

“Electrifying … A top-tier Reacher book.”

—Janet Maslin,
The New York Times

“As always, the action is intense, the pace unrelenting, and the violence unforgiving. Child remains the reigning master at combining breakneck yet brilliantly constructed plotting with characters who continually surprise us with their depth.”


Booklist
(starred review)

“Perhaps there are action-lit writers more recognizable than Child, but the bet is that none of them will turn in a tighter-plotted, richer-peopled, faster-paced page-turner this year.”


Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

Praise for
THE HARD WAY

“The best thriller writer of the moment.”


The New York Times

“Jack Reacher, the tough-minded hero of a series of bestselling noir thrillers, has all the elements that have made this genre so popular among men for decades. He travels the country dispensing his own form of justice, often violently and without remorse.… Reacher is doing something surprising: winning the hearts of many women readers.”


The Wall Street Journal

Praise for
ONE SHOT

“Ranks in the first tier … Before it’s all, vividly, over, one feels confident that Reacher—smart, rootless, and brave—will not only get his man but make him suffer.”


The New Yorker

By Lee Child

Killing Floor

Die Trying

Tripwire

Running Blind

Echo Burning

Without Fail

Persuader

The Enemy

One Shot

The Hard Way

Bad Luck and Trouble

Nothing to Lose

Gone Tomorrow

61 Hours

Worth Dying For

And look for

THE AFFAIR

Coming in hardcover and eBook
September 2011 from Delacorte Press

Read an excerpt at the end of this eBook

Second Son
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

2011 Delacorte Press eBook Original

Copyright © 2011 by Lee Child
Excerpt from
The Affair
© 2011 by Lee Child

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

D
ELACORTE
P
RESS
is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-345-52972-5

Cover design: Carlos Beltran

www.bantamdell.com

v3.1

Contents
CHAPTER ONE

On a hot August Thursday in 1974, an old man in Paris did something he had never done before: he woke up in the morning, but he didn’t get out of bed. He couldn’t. His name was Laurent Moutier, and he had felt pretty bad for ten days and really lousy for seven. His arms and legs felt thin and weak and his chest felt like it was full of setting concrete. He knew what was happening. He had been a furniture repairman by trade, and he had become what customers sometimes brought him: a wormy old heirloom weakened and rotted beyond hope. There was no single thing wrong with him. Everything was failing all at once. Nothing to be done. Inevitable. So he lay patient and wheezing and waited for his housekeeper.

She came in at ten o’clock and showed no great shock or surprise. Most of her clients were old, and they came and went with regularity. She called the doctor, and at one point, clearly in answer to a question about his age, Moutier heard her say “Ninety,” in a resigned yet satisfied way, a way that spoke volumes, as if it was a whole paragraph in one word. It reminded him of standing in his workshop, breathing dust and glue and varnish, looking at some abject crumbly cabinet and saying, “Well now, let’s see,” when really his mind had already moved on to getting rid of it.

A house call was arranged for later in the day, but then as if to confirm the unspoken diagnosis the housekeeper asked Moutier for his address book, so she could call his immediate family. Moutier had an address book but no immediate family beyond his only daughter Josephine, but even so she filled most of the book by herself, because she moved a lot. Page after page was full of crossed-out box numbers and long strange foreign phone numbers. The housekeeper dialed the last of them and heard the whine and echo of great distances, and then she heard a voice speaking English, a language she couldn’t understand, so she hung up again. Moutier saw her dither for a moment, but
then as if to confirm the diagnosis once again, she left in search of the retired schoolteacher two floors below, a soft old man who Moutier usually dismissed as practically a cretin, but then, how good did a linguist need to be to translate
ton père va mourir
into
your dad is going to die
?

The housekeeper came back with the schoolteacher, both of them pink and flushed from the stairs, and the guy dialed the same long number over again, and asked to speak to Josephine Moutier.

“No,
Reacher
, you idiot,” Moutier said, in a voice that should have been a roar, but in fact came out as a breathy tubercular plea. “Her married name is Reacher. They won’t know who Josephine Moutier is.”

The schoolteacher apologized and corrected himself and asked for Josephine Reacher. He listened for a moment and covered the receiver with his palm and looked at Moutier and asked, “What’s her husband’s name? Your son-in-law?”

“Stan,” Moutier said, “Not Stanley, either. Just Stan. Stan is on his birth certificate. I saw it. He’s Captain Stan Reacher, of the United States Marine Corps.”

The schoolteacher relayed that information and listened again. Then he hung up. He turned and said, “They just left. Really just days ago, apparently. The whole family. Captain Reacher has been posted elsewhere.”

CHAPTER TWO

The retired schoolteacher in Paris had been talking to a duty lieutenant at the Navy base on Guam in the Pacific, where Stan Reacher had been deployed for three months as Marine Corps liaison. That pleasant posting had come to an end and he had been sent to Okinawa. His family had followed three days later, on a passenger plane via Manila, his wife Josephine and his two sons, fifteen-year-old Joe and thirteen-year-old Jack.
Josephine Reacher was a bright, spirited, energetic woman, at forty-four still curious about the world and happy to be seeing so much of it, still tolerant of the ceaseless moves and the poor accommodations. Joe Reacher at fifteen was already almost full grown, already well over six feet and well over two hundred pounds, a giant next to his mother, but still quiet and studious, still very much Clark Kent, not Superman. Jack Reacher at thirteen looked like an engineer’s napkin sketch for something even bigger and even more ambitious, his huge bony frame like the scaffolding around a major construction project. Six more inches and a final eighty pounds of beef would finish the job, and they were all on their way. He had big hands and watchful eyes. He was quiet like his brother, but not studious. Unlike his brother he was always called by his last name only. No one knew why, but the family was Stan and Josie, Joe and Reacher, and it always had been.

BOOK: Second Son
2.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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