Pun Salad

Reacher starts things out by being a little too observant of the swirl of Manhattan street traffic as he sips an espresso outside a coffee shop. He sees a man get into a Mercedes and drive off—that's all. But when he revisits the same shop the next day, he's asked to tell what he remembers.

Why? Because the car contained a $1e6 ransom payoff; the wife and stepchild of Charles Lane, head of a private "security organization", have been kidnapped. No cops! But Reacher's not a cop, and he's roped into the scheme, joining in with Lane's team of cold-blooded mercenaries. Can Reacher discover the bad guys and save the innocent? As Child might write: "That was for sure. That was clear."

This entry in the series is slightly unusual in that (and stop reading if you don't even want a minor spoiler) Reacher keeps making mistakes and getting things wrong here. (Basically, if Reacher confidently asserts something on one page, expect it to be contradicted shortly.) The plot essentially turns on Reacher's misconceptions. That's a relief, I suppose, for those who have found Reacher to be impossibly omniscient in previous books.