Literature / Jack Reacher

"Someone does a very bad thing, and Reacher takes revenge."

— Lee Child

A series of novels by British-born Lee Child, about ex-Military Policeman Jack Reacher, Walking the Earth after mustering out from over a decade of service. A Military Brat, having spent his younger years being posted all around the world, he decides to get a closer look at his home country. On his journeys across America he stumbles across his fair share of forgers, smugglers, gun runners, drug dealers and assassins. Being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold and a former soldier with a personal code of honor, he executes vigilante justice without mercy and proceeds to, in a very realistic manner, kick the asses of the villains.

Novels

1. Killing Floor (1997)
2. Die Trying (1998)
3. Tripwire (1999)
4. The Visitor (2000) (US: Running Blind)
5. Echo Burning (2001)
6. Without Fail (2002)
7. Persuader (2003)
8. The Enemy (2004)
9. One Shot (2005)
10. The Hard Way (2006)
11. Bad Luck and Trouble (2007)
12. Nothing to Lose (2008)
13. Gone Tomorrow (2009)
14. 61 Hours (2010)
15. Worth Dying For (2010)
16. The Affair (2011)
17. A Wanted Man (2012)
18. Never Go Back (2013)
19. Personal (2014)
20. Make Me (2015)
21. Night School (2016)
22. The Midnight Line (2017)
23. Past Tense (2018)
24. Blue Moon (2019)
25. The Sentinel (2020)
26. Better Off Dead (2021)
27. No Plan B (2022)
28. The Secret (2023)

Short stories and novellas

• "Second Son"
• "Deep Down"
• "Guy Walks into a Bar"
• "James Penney's New Identity"
• "High Heat"
• "Everyone Talks"
• "Not a Drill"
• "Good and Valuable Consideration"
• "Small Wars"
• "The Picture of the Lonely Diner"
• "Faking a Murderer"
• "Too Much Time"
• "The Christmas Scorpion"
• "The Fourth Man"

Collections

• No Middle Name (2017)^note Includes two novellas (Too Much Time and High Heat) and ten short stories ("Deep Down", "Everyone Talks", "Guy Walks into a Bar", "James Penney's New Identity" (1999 version), "Maybe They Have a Tradition", "No Room at the Motel", "Not a Drill", "Second Son", "Small Wars", "The Picture of the Lonely Diner", and the first chapter of The Midnight Line)

A number of Expanded Universe books by other authors have been authorized and released under the name "Reacher Universe".

Reacher Universe

• By Dan Ames:
  • Jack Reacher's Special Investigators series
  • The Jack Reacher Cases series
• By Jude Hardin:
  • The Jack Reacher Files series
  • A Reacher Universe Collection
    • The Jack Reacher Experiment series (aka The Reacher Experiment)
    • The Reacher Code series
    • Stranded in the Old West series

---

Tropes applying to this series:

• The Ace: Reacher's resume establishes him as an ace at all forms of combat, rating him as "Beyond Outstanding" in hand-to-hand combat, as well as noting that he has won both the Wimbledon Cup (one of the premiere rifle-shooting competitions in the nation) and the U.S. Army Pistol Championship.
  • He's also fantastic at doing math in his head, has excellent time and direction senses, and knows a great deal of random useful facts even though he doesn't do much reading onscreen. Make Me mentions that he's not a very good driver.
• Ace Pilot: Downplayed and deconstructed and subverted in the case of Victor Hobie. He served as a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, and while he was second to top of his flight training class, he easily outperformed the first place pilot during wartime because of his lack of all meaningful emotion, including fear. This wasn't enough to save him from getting shot down, though, and when he came back to the States, he was on course to be the Big Bad of Tripwire. Subverted because the Big Bad isn't Hobie at all. He just stole Hobie's identity.
• Acrofatic: Downplayed with Beau Borken in Die Trying. He doesn't do anything very spectacular, but he is described as moving with surprising grace for someone of his weight.
• Action Girl: Neagley, the series' most frequently-recurring character. She's a tough-as-nails sergeant and Reacher's most trusted ally. She's also the only person in the series that Reacher notes that even he might be scared of.
• Airport Novel: According to The Other Wiki, Child explicitly writes these books as such.
• Alone with the Psycho: In Gone Tomorrow a suicide victim's son picks up a woman in a bar who turns out to be a terrorist. It doesn't end well for him.
• The Alleged Car: Casey Nice's whip in Personal is an old, heavily-used Ford pick-up that was previously a farm vehicle, which she bought from an airman at Fort Bragg for twenty dollars.
• And This Is for...:
  • Subverted in Killing Floor, where Reacher contemplates how, if he were a movie character, he would avenge his brother by dramatically confronting the killer and explaining the exact reason he wants vengeance before fighting honorably. Then Reacher dismisses that idea and instead decides to just smash the guy's head in, without any warning or explanation.
  • Lampshaded in Make Me, but then played straight at the climax of the book. Reacher muses that in the tales told by the firelight, this is how you should kill bad guys, because it would give peace to the people the bad guys have hurt. Then he goes up to shoot one of the Big Bad Duumvirate without saying a word. At the climax of the book, Reacher recalls this trope again, but is prevented from subverting it because the other Big Bad speaks first. This trope is finally played straight when Reacher's Girl of the Week says it before executing the Big Bad.
    Chang: This is for Keever.
    The bad guy had to be told.
    Chang: It could have been me.
• Amateur Sleuth: Not really, as Reacher spent over a decade as a decorated and skilled investigative MP, but since mustering out he's technically "amateur".
• Anticlimax:
  • In almost every book. Child spends a couple of hundred pages having the villain of the day do some truly horrendous things, so that only the most Cruel and Unusual Death will satisfy the reader. When Reacher finally catches up with him, though, the villain's death inevitably takes less than a sentence, and usually occurs by Boom, Headshot!. Most times, the villains don't even see it coming. Likely intentional, to illustrate Reacher's ruthless efficiency.
  • Lampshaded in the first novel Killing Floor where Reacher reflects on how the scene would play out in a book or a movie as he contemplates taking down the bad guy, and how direct confrontation isn't actually practical. Of course, when Reacher tries to kill the villain quickly and impersonally, he misses and then proceeds to have a fist-fight with the guy.
  • Also lampshaded in The Hard Way:
  For half a second he thought about calling [the Big Bad's] name. Making him turn around, arms raised. Telling him why he was about to die...
  Then he thought about a fight. Man to man. With knives, or fists. Closure... maybe something fairer.
  Then he thought about Hobart, and he pulled the trigger.
  • Particularly noticeable in Worth Dying For, where the Duncans have kept an entire town as their personal fiefdom for over 25 years. Reacher takes them all out in about an hour.
• Anti-Hero: Jack is notably an antithesis of this; whereas most comparable action heroes are dark figures tormented by addiction and haunted by past misbehavior, Jack is a teetotaller who maintains ties with legitimate authority; his personal ethics and wandering lifestyle are those of a modern Knight Errant. And he rarely feels guilty over his actions; what he most regrets are his mistakes.
• Artistic License – Physics: In Personal, Reacher tells us that adding 20% to a body's speed adds 400% to its kinetic energy. That should be 44% - good but not quite as impressive. Particularly jarring as Child consistently portrays Reacher as a mental arithmetic whiz.
• Asshole Victim: Sloop Greer in Echo Burning. Subverted, when evidence arises that Carmen was lying about his abusing her. Double subverted when it turns out that she was telling the truth all along.
• As You Know: On occasions, characters explain to Reacher things that he already knew, for benefit of the readers. It is justified, however, as the author always points out that Reacher lets them talk out of politeness, or to make them underestimate him.
• Author Catchphrase:
  • "Reacher said nothing." Seriously, Child has got that macroed. Guess what the biography of Child writing Make Me was called?
  • Also, "That's for damn sure."
    • Subverted in a heartwarming moment during 'Echo Burning' when Reacher is left alone with the heroine's daughter, a six-year-old girl named Ellie. She comments on how big the ocean is (after Reacher is saying he grew up all over the world), and he replies with 'That's for sure'. Considering how utterly cold, blunt, brutal and ruthless Reacher has been in every single book ('Echo Burning' included), it's touching to see him actually watching his language around a child
  • And "Not good. Not good at all."
  • And you can't forget whenever Child mentions Jack hitting someone in the solar plexus (the area between the pecs and stomach).
• Author Appeal: Child is a huge Baseball fan, particularly of the New York Yankees, and regularly references it throughout with Reacher also being a big fan and taking aliases from players throughout the history of the game. He is also a big fan of Aston Villa football club and regularly includes references to players.
• Author Tract: Child has a sympathetic view on immigrants, homosexuals, minorities, and disabled veterans.
  • In Echo Burning, a major subplot highlights the plight of an undocumented immigrant family.
  • In The Hard Way, one of the plot's most critical characters is a quadruple amputee veteran who survived capture after a special operation gone wrong. The veteran now lives in squalid conditions with no money, much to Reacher's displeasure.
  • In The Enemy, Reacher has to deal with two dead gay soldiers, and the prejudice that was still rampant on the military in the early 1990s.
  • The UK native Child is very much not a fan of guns in general and while Reacher and other heroic characters use firearms on occasion, which is justified by their profession and treated as acceptable because they know how to handle them properly and with respect, characters who use weapons to intimidate or make themselves seem tougher are invariably seen as pathetic and usually get shown how tough they actually are by Reacher.
• Badass Adorable:
  • In 61 Hours, it is revealed that decades ago, the US Army ran an experiment on Army brats to try to identify children who did not have a typical fear response. A monster movie was screened on military bases with a secret camera hooked up to capture the children in the audience precisely 18 frames after the monster makes its first appearance. The only one they captured without a fear response? 6-year old Reacher. Lunging TOWARDS the screen. With a switchblade. Which he managed to deploy in 3/4 of a second.
  • Reacher's mother once garroted a schoolmate who threatened to expose her work for the French Resistance to the Nazis.
• Badass Bystander: Unusually for a protagonist, Reacher is essentially this. He normally doesn't have any specific involvement with the case at hand, getting involved purely out of circumstance and coincidence.
  • Used as Bait-and-Switch and ultimately averted during the Action Prologue of Persuader, where it seems like Jack Reacher just so happened to be a random bystander who prevents the abduction of a disfigured college student. Tomato Surprise: the "abduction" was staged by Jack Reacher and ATF, who joined forces in order to bring down a Big Bad from Reacher's past, who is currently blackmailing the college student's father into assisting him with his criminal scheme.
• Badass Boast: If a fight is avoidable, Reacher usually resorts to this.
• Badass Crew: Reacher's old 110th Special Investigative Unit.
• Badass Driver: Averted. Its' been mentioned a few times that, for all his skills, Reacher is not a very good driver and he doesn't even have a driver's license.
• Badass Family: Hell yeah.
  • Reacher... is Reacher.
  • Reacher's father, Stan, was a Marine infantry captain. Reacher himself suggests that his father was even more stone-cold than he is.
  • Before he died, Reacher's brother, Joe, was a Treasury agent who single-handedly prevented foreigners from smuggling counterfeits into the U.S.
  • The most surprising of all, however, is Reacher's mother. At 13, she was an active member of the French Resistance, escorting fallen pilots to safety by pretending they were relatives. When a schoolmate threatened to expose her to the Nazis, she garroted him to death.
  • In Never Go Back, Reacher is hit with a paternity lawsuit alleging he's the father of a fourteen-maybe-fifteen-year-old girl. As he's also getting hit with a decades-old excessive force charge, Reacher knows the paternity suit is at best a distraction or at worst a trap. However, he has to make sure, so events happen in a way that make him head out to where the supposed mother and daughter are. He finds himself meeting Sam(antha) Dayton, a fourteen-maybe-fifteen-year-old girl who's tall and blonde like him, with excellent observational skills, a penchant for wandering off by herself, casual dangerous conversations, etc. She's essentially a Badass-In-Training just missing a mentor father figure to help her to the next level. It's a damn shame Reacher and Sam's mother don't even know each other.
• Bad Guy Bar: The far-right hangout in Night School is a classic example.
• Ballistic Discount:
  • Reacher has robbed illicit arms dealers more than once. Why do they not expect this? Who knows.
  • Double subverted in Bad Luck and Trouble, where a shady pawn shop owner pulls a gun on Reacher instead of selling him one. Reacher is surprised, but his fist can still move faster than the owner's reaction time.
• Battle in the Rain: The confrontation on the mesa in Echo Burning. After a whole book spent in the blistering heat, with the locals repeatedly saying a big storm is on the way, it finally breaks just in time for the climactic fight. Notably, Reacher actually kills his opponent with his opening shot, but the downpour is so heavy that he can barely see or hear anything, meaning he spends several minutes carefully maneuvering and trying to outsmart her before stumbling over her corpse. A combination of relief and the absurdity of the situation makes him crack up laughing.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Antagonists have a tendency to be old or unattractive, while protagonists (and almost always the Girl of the Week) are attractive. In The Visitor, Reacher meets a woman who he considers so unattractive that he posits aliens wouldn't think she and his beautiful then-girlfriend Jodie were the same species, much less the same gender, and she's a complete jerk, albeit for personal reasons. The same woman turns out to be the antagonist. For personal reasons.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Reacher's nomadic lifestyle, constant travelling and rough sleeping on top of his physical acts of violence as both a giver and recipient has done very little to detract from his rugged good looks.
• Been There, Shaped History: A minor example, but Die Trying reveals that Reacher was singlehandedly responsible for the adoption of the Beretta 92 by the United States military instead of the Glock during the mid-1980s handgun trials, based upon an article he wrote while recovering from injuries.
• Berserk Button: Reacher doesn't like con artists who prey on vulnerable people, especially if they have links to the military. In Tripwire, he discovers a private eye who charged an elderly couple $18,000 for a bogus report claiming their missing son is still alive in a Vietnamese POW camp. Reacher takes the investigator's truck and forces him to refund the couple's money.
• Big Damn Heroes: Reacher routinely does this during the climaxes of his stories.
• Big Eater:
  • Reacher qualifies as this, especially given his size and the amount of physical activity he engages in.
  • Sheriff Elizabeth Devereaux in The Affair is another example. Reacher watches her put away a cheeseburger and fries and notes:
  She was a slim woman. She must have had a metabolism like a nuclear reactor.
• The Big Guy: Reacher stands at 6'5" and is built like a brick wall.
  • Beaten out by "Little" Joey Green, The Dragon in Personal, who stands seven feet tall and weighs close to 300 pounds. Unfortunately, the Square-Cube Law hits him hard: He finds it hard to fit into enclosed locations (his car, a shed), and the strain on his body has possibly made him a drug-seeker (at least, when he finds a loose pill that for all intents and purposes, he is unable to identify, he has no qualms in immediately popping it).
• Bigot with a Crush: In the Back Story of Die Trying, Right-Wing Militia Fanatic Beau Borken and his four childhood friends/co-founders of his group crucified a sixth friend of theirs for falling in love with a Mexican girl.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Briefly discussed in The Hard Way. As Pauling puts it, in their situation, there are no good guys. Just bad guys and worse guys. The worst guy ends up being an extremely good guy, making this a definite subversion.
• Blatant Lies: Sometimes Reacher indulges in this. For example, in 61 Hours, regarding his old desk:
  Amanda: There's a big dent on the right hand side. People say you made it, with someone's head.
  Reacher: People say?
  Amanda: Like a folk legend. Is it true?
  Reacher: I think the movers did it.
  Amanda: It's perfectly concave.
  Reacher: Maybe they dropped a bowling ball.
  • In The Hard Way, a character uses a phony name on an apartment lease in New York City. The name is just two nearby street names put together. The word 'blatant' actually comes up in the narration. This is a subversion of the trope. The two nearby street names helped pinpoint the location of the kidnapper's apartment, which is exactly what the kidnapper wanted.
• Brain Bleach: In Worth Dying For, Reacher regrets his decision to look inside the barn, and wants for no one to ever look in there again.
• Bullying a Dragon: Reacher is a huge guy who generally has absolute confidence in a fight. That doesn't typically stop random mooks from thinking they can take him down, even if they also know of his military background. Generally, this leads to a Once an Episode moment of Reacher beating down some thug who made the mistake of thinking he was easy pickings.
• Bully Hunter: Reacher is essentially a highly-trained adult version of this. He has mentioned before that he does what he does not out of any specific sympathy for "the little guy", but simply that he hates "the big guy", meaning those who attempt to extort and bully others.
  • This partially stems from his mother, who taught him that, due to his prodigious size and strength, he needed to do the right thing. Naturally, he doesn't tolerate those who don't.
• Busman's Holiday: In his never ending sightseeing journey of USA, Reacher stumbles into more than a few conspiracies and criminals. Hilarity Ensues.
  • A particularly major is example is his attempt to get to Virginia, a journey which gets him involved in taking down four different criminal conspiracies over about two weeks, in one case moving from one to the next in the same night. Reacher just can't catch a break!
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Reacher has never thought much of John Kott, the rogue sniper he arrested in his Army days. Kott, however, takes his arrest as a personal insult and looks to get even with Reacher as soon as he's finished his prison time. (Reacher eventually figures out Kott's obsession was stoked by the Chessmaster O'Day, who had Kott make an assassination attempt on a national leader prior to an important conference, so O'Day could lead a joint capture operation, bank some political influence, and raise his profile).
• Character Name Alias: Reacher regularly hides himself by using the names of New York Yankees second basemen as aliases.
  • Paul Hubble, an important yet conflicted member of the conspiracy behind the events of Killing Floor, goes missing partway through the story. Reacher figures out he had been laying low, moving between hotels around the Atlanta metro area, and based on Hubble having told him that The Beatles were his favorite band, correctly deduces that Paul was using the band members' surnames (except McCartney's, obviously) on a rotating basis every time he checked into a hotel.
• Chekhov's Armory: A fundamental, often beautifully done aspect of the series. There are often so many things to keep track of that when they come back, it'll be a surprise even though you can clearly remember their first mentions.
• Chekhov's Gag: In 61 Hours, Reacher has a conversation with the police deputy Peterson about 'Plato', the alias of a criminal they're after. Peterson doesn't know who the actual Plato was, and they have a brief back-and-forth that ends with Reacher telling him that Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher. Later, Peterson looks up 'Plato' in the police database, and gets redirected to Google, which helpfully tells him that Plato was a Greek philosopher. This turns out to be a more conventional Chekhov's Gun when they view some footage of a coded message from Plato.
• The Chessmaster: the masterminds behind the events of A Wanted Man, Echo Burning, and Personal.
• Chick Magnet: Reacher's attractive enough to get a Girl of the Week, after all, though that doesn't stop other women for falling for him as well. Tellingly, the Red Herring Girl of the Week in The Visitor isn't interested in him, and she turns out to be a villain, while the real Girl of the Week is attracted to him.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Reacher is quite simply unable to ever not help someone in need or take down someone abusing their power, regardless of what he has to do to make it happen. Several of the novels have moments where he could just walk away. He never does.
• CIA Evil, FBI Good: A Wanted Man sees noble FBI agents teaming up with Reacher and actually getting the hard work done (though the Bureau in general is portrayed as a little morally grey), while the CIA spends the whole book trying to boss people around and cover their own ass, and the whole thing started because one of their agents was The Mole working with a terrorist cell, which they completely failed to detect.
• Cold Sniper: John Kott, the rogue sniper in Personal. After getting arrested by Reacher, he dedicates his whole life trying to get back at him. Reacher deduces that the Big Bad O'Day must have provided John with financial support upon his release, and nurtured Kott's hatred of Reacher so Kott would eliminate Reacher as soon as he had the chance. This would prevent Reacher from discovering who really was behind it all (whether Kott or Reacher died) and keep the Big Bad's position secure. It almost worked.
• Combat Pragmatist: Reacher, most prominently. Eye gouging, throat slitting, Groin Attack, etc., anything to kill his enemies quickly.
  Reacher: The other guy cares how he wins, I care about pissing on the other guy's grave.
• Commie Nazis: The main antagonists of The Sentinel were Russian operatives that covered their tracks by pretending to be Nazis. Their safehouse even had pictures of Hitler and Stalin.
• Confess to a Lesser Crime: A variant appears in a subplot from 61 Hours where a traitor who killed his wife is captured by Susan Turner (with some help from Reacher). He gives up the information they want and confesses to the murder in exchange for not being tried for treason, to avoid further disgracing his parents and brother.
  • In The Sentinel the Russian operatives produced disinformation leading investigators to conclude they were Neo-Nazis making a rally.
• Continuity Nod: While each novel stands well on its own, there are periodically references to events that happened in previous books.
  • At many points throughout the books, mention is made of a brother of Reacher's, who also served in the military. This brother's death was a major plot point in the very first Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor.
  • In The Visitor/Running Blind, Reacher is mentioned as having suffocated someone to death exactly once. The narrative's description of the act matches what he did to a minor character in Die Trying.
  • In Without Fail, Reacher is shown as having a file in the FBI database, which was created when he worked with them during The Visitor/Running Blind.
  • In One Shot, Reacher's lover notices a scar on his chest from a gunshot. Reacher comments that he got it in New York years prior. Specifically, at the end of Tripwire.
    • Later, the fact that he has a large scar on his abdomen (originally mentioned in Die Trying) becomes a minor plot point.
  • The books 61 Hours, Worth Dying For, A Wanted Man and Never Go Back all lead exactly into each other:
    • Reacher is still suffering the effects of the ending of 61 Hours a couple of days later, when Worth Dying For begins. While it's not major enough to change the course of the plot, it is touched upon from time to time until he receives medical treatment for it.
    • Reacher's nose is broken during a confrontation in Worth Dying For and he's still got his improvised first aid at the start of A Wanted Man, which starts a few hours later.
    • In Never Go Back he manages to finally get to Virginia, having decided to go there at the end of 61 Hours on the strength of the phone conversations he has with someone there. It essentially takes him two and a half books to get there.
  • The story of Dominique Kohl, whose mutilation and death Reacher feels responsible for, is explored in Persuader. Later, in Personal, Reacher is confronted with a bunch of documents listing his failures as an MP, and chief among them is Kohl. He explains what happened to her, and struggles with the fact that the CIA girl assisting him reminds him of Dominique, making him hesitant to let her put herself in danger despite the completely different nature of their situation.
  • Reacher buries his mother in The Enemy. Later, in Personal, he's in Paris for unrelated reasons, and takes a detour to visit her grave, with much of his reminiscence about her being direct references to events in The Enemy.
• Contrived Coincidence: In The Killing Floor, Reacher just happens to wander into the town his brother was very recently murdered in. ^note  It was just a matter of unlucky timing: the town his brother was investigating was once home to a obscure 1930s blues guitarist. Knowing Reacher likes blues music, his brother sent him a postcard telling him about it, and as luck would have it, Reacher had just left the army and decided to come and soak up the legends. As a matter of fact, once Reacher does the math, he figures out he passed the place where his brother died just around the time it happened.
  • The Affair tries to justify this with messages back and forth to his brother in that town, and about Blind Blake. Then Reacher takes his mustering out.
  • In The Visitor, Reacher just happens to rough up two "protection money" thugs with Army-issue handguns. The thugs turn out to be connected to a big Army smuggling racket, and he says the guy at the top is probably the killer the FBI is looking for and the victims were killed to cover it up. They find the guy at the top...and Reacher admits he just made up the theory to buy time, and it's the wrong guy. And then he learns the guy running the ring is in a wheelchair, and didn't commit the murders.
  • Worth Dying For: Averted: Eleanor Duncan calls the police with evidence of all the crimes going on, but because she admits that her husband constantly beats her, they think she's just making things up to get back at him. Thing is, she actually did get at least one cop's attention. When Reacher catches a lift with that cop, the cop just happens to drop Reacher off in exactly the right place for Reacher to start setting things to rights.
  • Exactly the same thing happens in Worth Dying For, only it's not the husband who beats up his wife, it's a pair of goons working for a guy who buys her husband's products, which are late in being delivered.
    • Also in Worth Dying For: Reacher takes a room in the Marriott in the town nearby while he investigates what happened to Dorothy's daughter 25 years ago. Meanwhile, the Italian, Iranian, & Iraqi mobsters from Vegas, who are there to put pressure on the Duncans (who in turn have blamed their supply-chain issues on Reacher), have also gotten rooms in the Marriott. Reacher concludes his research & aims to return to Dorothy to tell her his findings. He happens to encounter one of the Iranians in the carpark, kills him in self-defense and stuffs him in the trunk of the car he was driving (which he borrowed from Eleanor and belongs to Seth), then takes the Iranians' car. When the remaining Iranian decides to rally the other mobsters to go and pressure the Duncans again, he is forced to steal another car from the hotel carpark because of the fact his partner appears to have absconded with theirs, and Seth's car that Reacher left behind is the best choice (he obviously can't boost the other mobsters' rental cars, and none of the other vehicles there are appropriate). Later, while the Iranian is watching the Duncans' compound, he inadvertently opens the trunk while trying to turn on the seat-warmer, and when he gets out and goes to close the lid, he finds his deceased partner. He then finds the documentation proving the car belongs to Seth, and comes to the conclusion that Reacher doesn't exist; the Duncans made him up to cover their own power play for supply-chain dominance (which admittedly, the Italians and Iraqis were also doing). Some of this is justified by the setting (it's rural Nebraska, Reacher and the bad guys are at the same hotel because it's the only hotel for at least sixty miles in any direction, the mobster takes his car because there's very limited options and everything else that's local is a dirty old farm truck) but it's still quite the string of events.
  • Once Reacher finally reaches his old headquarters in Never Go Back, the soldiers running the crime syndicate from inside the 110th and who have almost gotten rid of its CO suddenly need to deal with him as well, which they do by first having him reinstated, then arresting him on an old trumped-up charge of excessive force as well as a fake paternity lawsuit. The irony is that Reacher made the decision to go back just because he wanted to meet his successor.
• Cool Old Guy: In the later parts of the series, Reacher is pushing 60, yet still easily kicking the ass of anyone in his way.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Without Fail revolves around a plot to assassinate the Vice President-elect. Reacher is absolutely livid when he correctly guesses that the VP-elect had received a threatening message before the events of the book and knew who sent it, but never mentioned it to anyone, because by this point the plot has already resulted in several deaths and maimings. The VP-elect rebuts that he had no idea that it was important, and Reacher should really be blaming the Secret Service's policy of never telling anyone who's been threatened about the threat, because if the agents had just told him, he would have told them everything.
• Cowboy Cop: As a military policeman, Reacher often acted as this. It often got him results and solved big cases, but also bit him on the ass more than once.
• Create Your Own Villain: Gone Tomorrow is all about the fallout from this happening on a national level. The villains are Afghan terrorists—who had once fought off the Soviet invasion with covert US help. And the MacGuffin that both sides are trying desperately to get back is a photograph of a diplomatic meeting between US Special Forces and Osama bin Laden.
• Cruel Mercy: At the end of Bad Luck and Trouble, Reacher and his allies leave a Smug Snake terrorist client of the Big Bad tied up to be taken into custody and possibly tortured.
  Mahmoud's eyes were full of fear. He knew what was heading his way. Reacher figured he would prefer to die, which was why he left him there alive.
• Crusading Lawyer: Helen Rodin, Alice Aarons and the Pro Bono firm from Blue Moon.
• Cultured Badass: Downplayed. Reacher's wandering lifestyle means he's often unsure how to handle personal etiquette with civilians, and his knowledge of consumer technology is a little sketchy. Nevertheless, he's better educated than your average small-town cop.
  Reacher: Plato is a weird name for a Mexican, don't you think? Sounds more like a Brazilian name to me.
  Peterson: No, Yugoslavian. Like that old dictator.
  Reacher: That was Tito.
  Peterson: I thought he was a South African bishop.
  Reacher: That was Tutu.
  Peterson: So who was Plato?
  Reacher: An ancient Greek philosopher. The pupil of Socrates, the teacher of Aristotle.
  Peterson: So what has Brazil got to do with all that?
  Reacher: Don't ask.
• Cunning Linguist: Due to his mother being from France, Reacher is fluent in French. He also has passable conversational skills in Spanish (a Hispanic man notes his accent is terrible, but understood what he was saying anyway).
• Curb-Stomp Battle: It is rare for anyone to give Reacher serious trouble in a fistfight. This is especially true in later books, which show him easily taking on highly-trained fighters and coming out unscathed.
  • A gunfight example comes when he infiltrates the Ukranian. headquarters in Blue Moon through a secret passage the boss had built. and simply guns down the whole organization one by one as they're all running to the office to see what's happening.
• Cut Himself Shaving: Subverted in 61 Hours. Upon arriving in town, Reacher beats up a pair of bikers. When a police officer arriving on the scene asks for the reason that he now has to call two ambulances, Reacher explains that it was because of the ice. When the officer skeptically asks if Reacher really expects him to believe that the bikers slipped on the ice, Reacher clarifies that the ice caused him to slip a little and took some of the force off of one of his blows. If not for the ice, the officer would be calling for one ambulance, and one coroner's wagon.
  • In Personal, Reacher confronts O'Day about plotting the whole, um, plot, for career purposes. Then Reacher decides to Leave Behind a Pistol. Some time later, he he reads that O'Day died in a weapon-handling accident.
• Deader than Dead: Several allies of Reacher have particularly gruesome deaths and usually their corpses are described as horribly mutilated, most notably Dominique Kohl in Reacher's backstory as told in Persuader. Dominique's brutal death even serves as Foil for the subsequent botched murder attempt of her killer (Quinn) by Reacher. Unlike Dominique, Quinn only gets shot from a handgun, doesn't suffer any obviously unsurvivable injuries, and Reacher doesn't even get to examine his body after shooting him, so it's obvious that he survived.
• Deadpan Snarker: Reacher gets this way very often, especially when talking to people he doesn't like. A prime example from Gone Tomorrow as the villains, a pair of Afghan terrorists, are preparing to kill him after he runs out of ammunition, and so make him empty his pockets and strip off his clothes, then critique his few belongings:
  Svetlana Hoth: You’re a poor man.
  Reacher: No, I’m a rich man. To have everything you need is the definition of affluence.
  Svetlana: The American dream, then. To die rich.
  Reacher: Opportunity for all.
  Svetlana: We have more than you, where we come from.
  Reacher: I don’t like goats.
• Death by Origin Story: Dominique Kohl, a young military police colleague of Reacher who was killed by Xavier Quinn during their botched investigation of his crimes.
• Den of Iniquity: The female messenger's meeting place in Night School is utterly one of these, complete with Bestiality Is Depraved and Bondage Is Bad.
• Despair Event Horizon: Reacher comes this close to shooting himself after he finds out the cop and the witness he's sworn to protect in 61 Hours have been murdered. He actually has to have someone talk him out of it.
• Determinator: You do something evil to someone, Jack Reacher will come after you and nothing will stop him from going after outside of death.
• Diabolical Mastermind: Julia Lamarr, the Dirty Cop FBI profiler who murders five women just to disguise the motive of one murder. Reacher has got to catch her in the act because nobody will believe him otherwise- and even then, her coworkers try to pin Lamarr's crimes on him.
• Did Not Get the Girl:
  • At least occasionally. For example, in Die Trying, while Reacher and Holly Johnson have a clear attraction and at one point engage in Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex, she is in love with someone else and moves in with (and probably marries) him at the end of the novel. Reacher himself just wants her to be happy, though he’s more than a little disappointed about it.
  • At least she makes it out of the novel alive, unlike Secret Service agent/love interest M.E. Froelich in Without Fail, who not only takes a bullet protecting the Vice-President-elect but expires in Reacher's arms afterwards.
  • While it's a stretch to call her a love interest, Reacher is attracted to Special Agent Sorrenson in A Wanted Man. However, she gets shot to death as well. Reacher was already planning to storm the enemy's stronghold before her death, but its safe to say his subsequent massacre of the baddies is something of a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • Reacher ends up hooking up with Vaughn from Nothing To Lose, but it goes nowhere, because she's married, her husband's a vegetable and she only hooked up with him because they both knew that Reacher wouldn't be sticking around for long.
  • In Echo Burning, Reacher does not hook up with anyone, despite a few Red Herring girls being present. Carmen Greer makes an advance, but he turns her down after thinking about it, probably because she's married and has a kid. He's clearly attracted to Alice, the lawyer he teams up with, but she turns out to be a lesbian and has a girlfriend. He's respectful of this, though the narration notes he's disappointed.
  • Reacher also does not sleep with Casey Nice in Personal. The book implies that Nice just feels too young for Reacher, who by this point of the series has reached more than fifty years old.
• Disability Alibi: James Barr, a former Army sniper, is accused of the sniper murders, but Jack doesn't believe it. The shoots were from a rather awkward position when a better one was available, and the only miss conveniently preserved the bullet. This suggests that Barr simply isn't a good enough marksman to have pulled off the killings: they had to have been performed by one of the finest shooters in the world, and Barr was merely decent. It turns out that not only was James Barr framed, but the shooter choose the position not to kill random people but a specific person to hide among a random spree.
• Distaff Counterpart: Frances Neagley, an old crew of Reacher's in his 110th Special Investigative Unit. She is as capable a profiler and as stone-cold a soldier as Reacher is. One time Reacher admits that he is almost scared of her.
• Dramatic Gun Cock: Deconstructed in The Affair, when Reacher debates the advantage gained from the intimidation factor of cocking his shotgun versus the disadvantage of having one fewer shell in the gun if it comes to a shoot out.
• Driven to Suicide: Gone Tomorrow opens with Reacher identifying a woman on the subway as a suicide bomber in action. When he tries to talk her out of it, she pulls a gun, instead of a bomb, out of her bag—then blows her own brains out. The cause: the villains had been blackmailing her to steal classified information from Army records, then they killed her son when she couldn't deliver the information in time.
• Duct Tape for Everything: In Worth Dying For, Reacher uses it as a bandage for his broken nose, mentioning that it had previously been used in the same manner after he sustained abdominal injuries in the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • In the first book, Killing Floor, and to some extent in the second, Die Trying, Reacher has actual feelings and vulnerabilities. He sings and dances at various points; not quite activities Jack Reacher classic can be imagined doing. His competence level is not quite so superheroic as in later books, either.
  • Killing Floor has a substantial Reacher-inflicted body count, Die Trying has somewhat fewer, then it settles down to more modest numbers. With occasional peaks thereafter, but not the same action-adventure glee as the early novels.
  • Returns with a vengeance in Blue Moon. At one point there was a literal pile of bodies stacking on each other.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Subverted and downplayed with Reacher. He never served in any Special Operations capacity, and military policemen aren't typically regarded as elite in real life (though a few characters in-story seem to believe so.) That said, he did serve in an elite MP unit dedicated to dealing with special cases, which often brought him up against opponents that were Rangers, Delta Force, etc.
• Enhance Button: Averted in Die Trying. The FBI gets a hold of some surveillance photos of people perpetrating a crime, but the technician assigned to them has to go through some lengthy, elaborate processes to recreate the perpetrators' faces in better detail, factoring in the camera's position and focal length, using the face of one person they do have other photos of as a reference, and even obtaining colored objects from the crime scene to decode the grays in the (black and white) photos. Even after all this, the result isn't necessarily accurate, because they have to extrapolate for anything the original photos didn't catch, such as the far side of a person's face viewed in profile.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Downplayed, justified and invoked in Worth Dying For. Gas tanks violently explode on four separate occasions, but always as a result of someone deliberately setting the car on fire. In multiple cases, it's explicitly noted that the explosion's strength is from the gas tank being very close to full. At the end of the story, Reacher specifically chooses a car with the fullest gas tank he can find to help with his final assault.
• Everyone Has Standards: Reacher is an unapologetic red-blooded seducer, but he will not sleep with a married woman, even when she directly offers.^note Technically he does once, but the woman's husband is a vegetable with no hope of recovery, and so is dead for all intents and purposes.
  • Reacher is also an unapologetic murderer (of bad guys) with no compunctions about using violence, but there are some opponents he'll hold back against, and he won't kill someone he's never met just because he's asked to. In one case, he actually stops a fight and backs off to allow an opponent to escape a burning car, because said opponent is just a 20-something kid hired as dumb muscle and doesn't deserve to die.
  • Reacher has done and seen a lot of things, but in Worth Dying For, seeing the barn where the corpses of little girls have been dumped for years after being raped and tortured by the villains is too much for him. He grimly says that he's going to regret going in there for the rest of his life.
• Evil Counterpart: The Big Bad of 61 Hours is "Plato", a foil to Reacher. He's short where Reacher is large, exercises to maintain his strength while Reacher doesn't, makes people come to him while Reacher wanders the country and meets people, is Hispanic while Reacher is half-French, and intimidates people with his resources instead of his personal presence. ^note He's also a criminal mastermind at the head of a large organization while Reacher is just a drifter, and both are willing to hurt people at the drop of a hat to serve their goals.
  • Most importantly, Plato's a complete sociopath who doesn't care about anyone on Earth besides himself, while Reacher regularly gets involved in plots because he hates bullies, and nearly kills himself out of grief and shame because he failed to protect two people he barely knew.
  • In the ending, when they do meet and fight, it happens to be in tight quarters where Reacher can't use his size very easily, which puts them on relatively even footing.
• Evil Plan: Most Reacher villains make use of very down-to-earth but nevertheless highly effective Plot Devices to enact their plans, sometimes bordering on MacGuffin territory. Determining the identity of the Plot Device generally composes a huge portion of the plot, to the point where a single sentence can give away the entire story.
• Experienced Protagonist: Reacher spent over a decade as an MP, making him an expert at criminal profiling and law enforcement procedure. Combined with his extensive training and combat experience, it's rare for him to come across someone that's more experienced or prepared than him.
• Extreme Doormat: Most of the Duncans' neighbors in Worth Dying For fall into this trope, especially the motel owner and the doctor. They spend most of the book doing whatever Reacher or the Duncans want them to.
• Flanderization: Reacher grew more and more invulnerable since his first appearance in Killing Floor, shedding away his fears and feelings in lieu of superhuman competence. This process has been dialed back, however, starting in 61 Hours, where he fails to save a witness he's supposed to protect and a cop he's grown to like. After this, he had to be talked out of suicide.
• A Fistful of Rehashes: In Blue Moon, Reacher goes to a city divided between rival Albanian and Ukrainian gangs and takes out two Albanian loan sharks harassing his new friends. The Albanians assume the Ukrainians did it (because of the fact that the Albanians had just taken over the loan-sharking racket) and retaliate, leading to an escalating chain of retaliatory killings. Reacher is initially oblivious to the mob war but sets out to decapitate the leadership of both gangs by the second half of the book (admittedly, he's specifically after one man that the Ukrainians are hiding at all costs; the Albanians only got wiped out because they targeted Reacher).
• Foreshadowing: The whole series is laden thick with this trope, as befitting the constant theme of mystery. Sometimes, the foreshadowing takes the form of obviously unanswered questions, and some later follow-up is to be expected; other times, the first mentions blend right in with the usual narration, only to pop out at the reader later.
  • For example, Reacher mentions in Killing Floor that the guy who runs the shop he gets coffee at gives him coins in change because he doesn't have any one-dollar bills. The local counterfeiters have been acquiring every one-dollar bill they can get their hands on to make one-hundred-dollar bills.
• Flawless Token: The Girl of the Week has a tendency to be smarter, tougher, and more competent than most of the characters, while the male supporting characters have a tendency to be selfish, weak, stupid, or smarmy.
• Framing the Guilty Party: One short story has Reacher fake being shot by a Protection Racket enforcer (having a doctor whose brother is a victim of the racket put him in a hospital bed with an unnecessary bandage). The purpose of the deception is to make the police get a search warrant and raid the headquarters of the protection racket, searching for the gun supposedly used to injure Reacher. They don't find any gun but they do find concrete evidence of every illegal thing the crooks have actually done (including genuine attempted murder).
• Friend to All Children: Reacher is noticeably more tactful and soft-spoken when dealing with kids than he usually is with adults. Hurting or threatening them is a really good way to get on his bad side.
• Genius Bruiser: Reacher is usually portrayed as this, being both a brilliant investigator and a terrifyingly effective combatant.
• Girl of the Week: Each book tends to have Reacher teaming up with a young, attractive woman, who he inevitably sleeps with. To Child's credit, a curveball is thrown once or twice.
  • In A Wanted Man Reacher teams up with Special Agent Sorenson and Special Agent Karen Delfuenso. He likes and admires them both and feels at least fleetingly attracted to Sorenson. But the prospect of getting involved with either of them never comes up - as it were - and then Sorenson is killed in any case.
  • In Personal, Reacher teams up with Casey Nice, a CIA officer tasked to help him hunt down a rogue sniper. He doesn't sleep with her.
• Good is Not Nice: Reacher is often portrayed like this. He's firmly on the side of good throughout but he's blunt, taciturn, abrasive, extremely anti-social and has no issue threatening or hurting innocent people in the course of his investigations or killing opponents rather than bring them to justice in the traditional sense.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: How Reacher typically fights. He may have military training and experience, but he's a brawler first and foremost.
• Good Policing, Evil Policing: There will often be morally bankrupt law enforcement officials who get in the way of the titular Jack Reacher, and upstanding law enforcement officials who try to act by the book. Notably, when Reacher himself is in the Military Police in The Enemy, he tries to properly investigate the series of murders, while his replacement superior officer tries to have them covered up.
• Grammar Nazi: Reacher has claimed a few times that he has a pet peeve about spelling mistakes, contractions and not using proper punctuation.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: In Killing Floor, this is Reacher's first hint that Baker is in with the villains—he's very negligent handling Reacher in custody, because he already knows Reacher is innocent.
• Great Detective: A key part of Reacher and his Knight Errant wandering is his ability to make complicated deductions to learn information about people, communities, and conspiracies. He is only human and can make wrong deductions at important points, but the number of correct Awesome by Analysis moments he has easily make up for this.
• Greater-Scope Villain: In Personal, whoever's behind the assassination attempt. Except the assassination attempt wasn't. After the book's climactic fight, we learn that General Tom O'Day is the one who ordered John Kott to snipe at the French president, which prompted U.S. intelligence to reach out to Reacher, the MP who's once arrested Kott in the past, which triggered the plot of the book. Reacher doesn't kill O'Day on the spot because he has to make sure nothing happens to his partner, Casey Nice. He just puts a gun on the desk. O'Day dies in a weapon handling accident. Officially..
• Grevious Bottley Harm: Lampshaded in Echo Burning, when Reacher has been taken to a bar for the purpose of being scared off the Greer ranch.
• Guns Are Worthless: In The Sentinel Jack Reacher was able to overwhelm multiple gunsmen with his bare fists after they heard him speak and aimed their guns at him.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way: While Child does very well to avoid erroneous gun depictions, such as the frequent Hollywood Silencer trope, he has made some errors in his books:
  • The Killing Floor and The Enemy depict the Ithaca Roadblocker as a pump-action shotgun instead of a semi-automatic one and has it in the hands of both a cleaner and an AWOL soldier; those guns were designed for law enforcement and while it's possible that a civilian could get his hands on one, its very unlikely that one would be in the armed forces.
  • In Tripwire, Reacher gets his hands on a Steyr GB, then later screws on a suppressor stolen from a gun runner on the end of the barrel; The Steyr GB has a ported barrel to allow its gas delayed-blowback system to function; a ported barrel would interfere with the effectiveness of a suppressor, since the device is meant to hold the explosive gases and slow them down in order to reduce the noise of the pistol. Then again, a German gun company attempted to put a suppressor on a licensed copy of the GB, though its effectiveness is unknown.
  • In Die Trying, Reacher says that the Beretta M9 has more stopping power than the Glock 17 he tested for the army. The thing is, both guns should have the same stopping power because they both use the same caliber (9mm). To be fair, Reacher was a little prejudiced towards the Glock for being mostly made of plastic.
• Guilt by Coincidence: The whole plot of Worth Dying For is set in motion when Seth Duncan's wife shows evidence of being a battered woman, and Reacher locates Duncan and breaks his nose in retaliation. It turns out that Duncan does have a history of hitting his wife, and everyone in town knows it, but in this specific instance it was actually two criminal thugs pressuring Duncan who attacked her, not Duncan himself.
• Gutted Like a Fish: The villains of Gone Tomorrow, whose favorite method of execution is disembowelment. In contrast, Reacher says that he hates using knives, and he'll only do it if he can't get a better weapon.
• Handicapped Badass: Holly Johnson in the second novel, Die Trying. Having to rely on crutches to walk around doesn't stop her from escaping her holding cell and killing at least three guerrilla fighters armed with guns.
• Hard Head: Reacher frequently delivers full-force headbutts to his opponents with zero ill effects (on him, anyway; the other guy always goes down). Notably though, it's thoroughly Averted in Make Me, where Reacher gets a serious injury from being hit in the head.
• Hates Being Touched: Frances Neagley. This conveniently keeps her relationship with Reacher strictly platonic, allowing her to be a recurring sidekick rather than a particularly talented Girl of the Week.
• Heroic Build: Reacher never exercises or practices good diet and yet he's perfectly toned and extremely strong. He lampshades it in Never Go Back and blames it on good genetics.
  • It's possible that his preferred meal patterns (high-calorie Greasy Spoon food, as and when called for) and all the exercise he gets walking around (his second-most common mode of transport behind long-distance coaches and hitch-hiking) cancel each other out.)
  • “Tripwire” begins with Reacher in Florida, digging swimming pools with a shovel (on lots that are impossible to reach with a mechanical excavator). This was giving him a constant workout and very muscular body.
• Hidden Depths: As befitting many of the classic detectives such as Philip Marlowe, Reacher is often assumed to be a big, dumb thug at first glance. However, he's actually highly intelligent and surprisingly cultured, as well as being fluent in French & conversational in Spanish.
• Hollywood Atheist: It's been established a few times that Reacher doesn't have much regard for religion, quipping at someone who asked if he was born again that "once was enough" and avoids an airline that puts a scripture card with the food.
• Hollywood Silencer: Defied, any time a silenced weapon appears, the author or Reacher is quick to point out how they don't sound like they do in the movies. One book describes a suppressed Steyr GB as sounding like a book being thrown on the floor.
• Homeless Hero: Reacher lives without any address, staying in motels and sleeping rough when he has to.
• Honor Before Reason:
  • Sometimes crops up, especially when dealing with military-trained people or with people who have something to prove. And sometimes when they're trying to set up Reacher to frame himself.
  • Reacher occasionally thinks like this, but most of the time he prefers the practical solutions of finishing off a fight or a bad guy as swift and clean as possible.
    Get your retaliation in first.
  • This was why Reacher left the Army as he couldn't stomach having to overlook crimes and corruption just for the sake of public relations and seeing those in power get away with abusing their authority. After one too many incidents of going beyond his station, including putting one superior officer in a coma when it looked like he was to escape justice, he finally just quit.
• Humble Pie: Towards the end of Echo Burning, Reacher brings this up by name, in typical snarky fashion. It very much applies to the person he's talking to.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: In Echo Burning, some corrupt border patrol agents were doing this to illegal Mexican immigrants before an investigation scared them off. It turns out that the 'agents' in question are characters we've seen all throughout the story.
  • The main plot of Past Tense. They're Bow Hunting People.
• Hypno Fool: Played with. When Reacher meets an FBI profiler and trained hypnotist in The Visitor, she offers to put him under, and he jokes that she'll make him run down the street naked. Turns out she's the murderer, and she's been hypnotizing her victims into killing themselves and being accomplices to their own murder. This is arguably a more realistic version than usual, considering that she doesn't make them do anything against their normal morals. Right up until the part where she tells them to stuff their tongues down their own throat, which they don't realize will kill them. Reacher and his Girl of the Week realize the killer would've hypnotized him into being ineffectual.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Reacher has the "piercing and icy" variety, befitting his personality.
• I Know You Know I Know: Reacher gets into a mental version with one of these with a killer at the end of Echo Burning. He spends several moments trying to predict where they are going to move, and how they will know where he will move, and so on. Subverted, as Reacher actually killed them during their initial exchange of bullets, but the low visibility meant that he had no idea.
• Immediate Sequel: A Wanted Man picks up where Worth Dying For left off, with no gap at all in between. The latter ends with Reacher waiting for a ride on the side of the highway; the former begins with him waiting in the same spot, and the plot begins when he finally gets a ride.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Forms part of a thread throughout One Shot; Reacher notes that Barr is a decent sniper, but not good enough for the five kills. Reacher himself displays this when he dispatches Emerson, as on the Awesome page, though it's also established that he was a Wimbledon Cup contender, albeit one with rusty skills. ^note The Wimbledon Cup is a prestigious marksmanship competition, with many of the top shooters in the US military competing. Previous winners include Carlos Hathcock, founder of the USMC Scout Sniper school.
• I Never Told You My Name: Defied in The Hard Way. Kate makes sure to ask for Burke's name over the phone so that if she accidentally addresses him by name afterwards, it doesn't tip him off that she knows too much.
• Interesting Situation Duel: Reacher has a habit of getting into different, generally realistic, versions of this, especially during the climaxes of his stories.
• Inter-Service Rivalry: Comes up occasionally. While Reacher (an Army man) does show some respect for the Marines (his dad was one, after all), he still bickers with any he meets (calling them "Muscles Are Required, Intelligence Not Expected"). Personal subverts this, demonstrating the immense power of General O'Day by having Navy and Air Force working together for him without any arguing or showboating, which Reacher finds quite surprising.
• Invincible Hero: At least in terms of combat, it's rare for Reacher to have serious trouble. That said, he does get hurt on occasion, and this is less prevalent when it comes to his detective skills. While Reacher is very good at profiling and solving crimes, many of the biggest plot twists in the books come from him realizing he's been reading the entire situation wrong (such as in The Enemy.)
• It's Personal:
  • Some of the cases he looks into directly involve things from his military days that leads to Reacher doing everything to kill the bad guy. Killing Floor has the death of his brother, the deaths of the former members of his squad in Bad Luck and Trouble, and sighting the bad guy he thought dead in Persuader, and he was on his way to kill the fall guy in One Shot when he ran into the conspiracy set up by the Russian.
  • Ironically inverted in Personal, where Reacher goes after a rogue sniper he arrested back in his Army days. The sniper, having completed his time in prison, is now free and obsessed with Reacher, even though Reacher himself has never thought much of him.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Reacher is typically written this way. He's very blunt when he speaks, and can be an asshole to people he doesn't want to speak with and that's in addition to his brutal methods overall, never showing mercy to people he faces. That said, he does go above and beyond in his efforts to protect people and help out those in need, is very respectful to and protective of vulnerable people and is capable of acts of exceptional kindness and will soften up towards people once he gets to know them.
• Knight Errant: Jack Reacher is a great contemporary example. He roams the countryside (a good part of the US), saves damsels in distress (when he's not sleeping with them), and gives villains no quarter.
• The Last DJ: His entire military career was this; he spent twenty years in the Army total, making Major over the course of the first thirteen, only to be demoted to Captain for some offense, spent seven more years working his way up to Major again... and then "retired" because he finally got fed up with getting punished for catching his superiors with their hands in the cookie jar.
  • In 61 Hours it's revealed that he built up a case against a general who had been selling food supplies that should have gone to his troops in the Gulf. The general laughed at him and got his skull broken complete with a six-month coma. Only the strength of the case saved Reacher from outright discharge, but his commanding days were over.
  • The Affair covers his early retirement and the fact that he killed a congressman and a commanding officer of a special forces team for the murder and cover up of three girls near a training facility for the Army.
  • In the end, he started Walking the Earth just to get a look at the country he was defending, having been a Military Brat who didn't even see the US until he was nine.
    "Look out the window. Tell me what you see. You see the same things that you see everyday. Well, imagine you've never seen it. Imagine you spent your whole life in other parts of the world, being told everyday that you're defending freedom. Then you finally decide you've had enough. Time to see what you've given up your whole life for, everything. Get some of that "freedom" for yourself. Look at the people. You tell me which ones are free. Free from debt. Anxiety. Stress. Fear. Failure. Indignity. Betrayal. How many wish that they were born knowing what they know now? Ask yourself how many would do things the same way over again, and how many would live their lives like me."
• Last-Name Basis: He is known as Reacher, by everyone including his mother. One person managed to use this as a warning.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste: A minor criminal in The Sentinel took advantage of a setback in the local crisis to hide from crimes committed someplace else.
• Lightning Bruiser: Zizagged with Reacher. He's extremely quick in combat despite his size but is also described as a slow and heavy runner.
• MacGuffin: In Gone Tomorrow, both the US government and the terrorists are trying to retrieve a classified data file that a dead woman extracted from Army records. Reacher, on the other hand, just wants to find out why the woman died and kill those responsible—so he only cares about that file to the extent that it helps him solve the mystery. And when the finally find the USB stick holding the file, it had already been run over by a car, destroying it.
• Majorly Awesome: Reacher was a Major in the US Army, before getting busted down to Captain, and working his way back up to Major, prior to mustering out. In Never Go Back, he's briefly returned to this rank.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: In The Affair, Reacher and Sheriff Elizabeth Devereaux have sex on the ground right next to a railroad track. Right as the midnight train (and Reacher, and Devereaux) are coming.^note It's unclear whether Lee Child intended that as a double entendre or not, but several times over the course of the novel, Reacher and Devereaux do carefully time their sex so they orgasm right as the (very loud) train passes through town. The questionable (and gravel-covered) location makes somewhat more sense in context.
• Mathematician's Answer: Reacher does this sometimes when he doesn't feel like sharing information. In The Enemy, an officer is asking him about a general's death, to which he replies that the general had a heart attack. Where? In his chest cavity. The officer is not amused.
• Mighty Glacier: While Reacher can deliver quick blows with devastating power and speed, he's a far slower and heavier runner due to his build and is suited more to endurance than quick bursts of speed.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot:
  • Worth Dying For: One douchebag beating his wife -> his entire family (minus his wife) were smuggling women and girls from Thailand for the sex trade and for their own sick desires.
  • Killing Floor: The murder of Reacher's brother -> an international counterfeiting ring that kills anyone who gets remotely close to it.
  • The Enemy: A general dies of a heart attack -> his briefcase is missing -> multiple people are murdered -> there's a conspiracy between generals to murder members of the US military for the sake of their careers.
  • Basically the rule is that whenever the bad guys try to stop Reacher from investigating, whether through threats or incapacitating him (see his arrest and expulsion from the Company Town after simply trying to order a coffee in the local bar while passing through from Nothing to Lose or getting hit with a phony paternity suit in Never Go Back), he will either start investigating or continue to, at least once he's made sure his allies are protected.
• Mistaken Nationality: In Blue Moon the Ukrainian mob mistook Reacher for a member of the Russian mafia sent ahead of time to put the Albanians and Ukrainians against each other.
• Mob War: Between the Albanian and Ukrainian mob in Blue Moon.
• Must Have Caffeine: Reacher loves black coffee. His taste for the drink has been described as "making heroin addiction look like an amusing little take-it-or-leave-it sideline"
• Muzzle Flashlight:
  • Used deliberately by Reacher in Worth Dying For. During melee combat.
  • Also crops up in Echo Burning; he has a mix of factory ammo and hand-loads for his rifles, but doesn't trust the hand-loaded shells he has, guessing they'll be massively overpowered, so he decides to use their inevitable huge muzzle flash to just illuminate things and find a target. He's right.
  • An improvised actual Muzzle Flashlight (taping a flashlight to the barrel of a gun) was used in "No Going Back". The dumb jocks who created it soon discover its drawback: They had attached it to the gun in such a way that the head of the flashlight was in front of the muzzle and, as such, the flashlight was blown to pieces with the first shot fired. Reacher privately lampshades the tactical idiocy of this idea once he uses the trope in its traditional sense to aim himself at the guards.
• Neck Snap: Whenever Reacher wants a stealthy or quick kill, he does this with ease due to his strength. Sometimes after the act, he twists and turns the head to make sure the spinal cord is fully severed.
• Never Bring A Knife To A Fistfight: Subverted in Gone Tomorrow. The villains corner Reacher and disarm him, then set their own guns down and brandish knives instead. They're clearly looking forward to a knife-vs-fist fight. Then Reacher pulls out his own knife, which he had duct-taped to his back earlier, making for a much more even fight.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Reacher has a habit of gaining new skills or abilities as needed. Notably, in the first book he wears a watch, yet in the second it's revealed that he always knows what time it is. Other aspects of his character, such as his ability to wake himself up on command, his love of math, and his near-superhuman sniping skills appear in later books as needed.
• Nice to the Waiter: While Reacher is generally curt with most people, he is polite and respectful to restaurant workers and service staff...especially when they serve him coffee.
• Nuke 'em: Discussed in Night School, when Reacher and his colleagues are trying to figure out what's being traded. The idea hangs over their heads for a while, but not very long — everyone would know if a nuke went missing, considering how many safeguards are layered on them. The truth isn't quite so simple.
• Obviously Evil: Many of the villains, including about half of the conspiracy from the very first book.
• The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: Make Me features several meetings by a group of ten scattered locals involved in the criminal enterprise. They talk about the need to stop Reacher and his ally, but dance around discussing the nature of their racket due to being too frightened about the thought of exposure to contemplate it. They are making snuff films. Similar scenarios occur with the family meetings of the main four villains in Worth Dying For and the phone calls between the Big Bad Duumvirate in Never Go Back. The former are Human Trafficking and personally raping young girls to death, and the later are using military assets to bring in opium from Afghanistan.
• One-Hit Kill: Thanks to Reacher's tremendous strength, there have been several occasions where he's flat-out killed someone with one punch. Becomes a plot point in One Shot, when he's specifically noted to look like a man who could kill someone with one punch.
• One Phone Call: Reacher plays this straight in One Shot when he gets arrested.
• Orgy of Evidence: In One Shot, this is what the case against James Barr becomes. However, what makes Reacher suspicious is not the amount of evidence, but that the investigative team thought to look for a clue that they had no reason to believe existed.
  • In The Enemy, Reacher investigates the murder of a soldier that looks as if the soldier was killed for being gay. However, since the crime scene has a ridiculous amount of mutilation to the victim's corpse to make it look like a hate crime, Reacher concludes that it wasn't a hate crime because it's unlikely that a real hate crime would be that excessive; he believes that the murderer was just trying way too hard to make the murder look like a hate crime to throw off investigators.
• Pet the Dog: In both a figurative and a literal sense. Reacher is gruff and can be a bit of a Jerkass, but he tends to be somewhat softer when talking to children, the elderly, or the disabled. In the more literal sense, it's noted repeatedly that Reacher loves dogs and has considered adopting one at times. Tellingly, his reaction to a dog's slow death in Bad Luck and Trouble shows considerably more concern than he does for most human death.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Reacher and Neagley. They've been friends and colleagues for decades, but have never been romantically involved. Given that Neagley Hates Being Touched to a nearly lethal extent and Reacher is disinterested in anything that will keep him in one place, this is understandable.
• The Profiler:
  • Reacher can track people by their patterns of behavior.
  • Subverted in Bad Luck and Trouble when his former sergeant profiled him better than he profiled her and was waiting on him at the Denny's.
  • There's one of these in The Visitor (Running Blind in the U.S.). Subverted when she turns out to be the killer; everything she said in the novel was to try to throw people off her trail.
• Properly Paranoid: Reacher, a lot. He's always alert. This is discussed briefly in One Shot, where Reacher comments half-jokingly that he was simply Born Lucky. Not long after, he refuses to go to the door to accept room service, because nobody can know he's in the hotel room with his lover.
  Hutton: You never relax, do you?
  Reacher: The less I relax, the luckier I get.
• Real Men Take It Black: Reacher's preferred drink of choice is black coffee. He uses the term "pollutants" for cream, sugar and other flavorings.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Leon Garber, Jack Reacher's commanding officer. He does as much to cover Reacher's ass as he can and limit the fallout of his actions, even if it gets to the point where Reacher decides to just leave the Army instead.
• Red Herring: Often: Bad Luck and Trouble features two men tailing Reacher and the others, with one turning out to be a cop. The Hard Way features a mysterious woman spying on the headquarters of the man who hired Reacher and making calling in updates to someone the sister of his first wife, whose convinced that he killed her.
• Revenge: What this series is all about, according to its author. See the quote above.
• Revenge Myopia: The plot to assassinate the Vice President-elect in Without Fail has nothing to do with politics or anything along those lines. Instead, it's revealed that the VP-elect's father had once confronted two young thugs who'd destroyed his mailbox twice, and had then proceeded to chain them to a tree stump and beat them with a baseball bat while the VP-elect tried futilely to calm him down. Thirty years later, the thugs want the VP-elect dead both because his father is dead (so they can't go after him) and because the VP-elect saw them chained up and beaten, and they can't handle the idea that someone saw them in any state other than how they wanted people to see them.
• Riddle for the Ages: In Gone Tomorrow, Reacher figures out that both sides are trying to retrieve a missing photograph. The US government wants it because the photo's release would be disastrous for an up-and-coming senator... while an Afghan terrorist cell wants it because the photo's release would be even more disastrous for their cause. No one (outside the terrorists) can even guess why this photo would hurt the terrorists that much. And the photo gets destroyed before anyone can see it, anyway.
• Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: The main villains of Die Trying.
• Ruthless Foreign Gangsters: In a nameless city in Blue Moon the territories are divided in half between the Albanian mob and the Ukrainian mob.
• Russian Guy Suffers Most: Played straight in One Shot. Not only do the Russian gangsters get the crap kicked out of them by Reacher, but the leader, "Zec", had spent decades in the gulag. As spelled out by the Jack Reacher movie, the torture Zec lived through was positively inhumane.
• Rural Gangsters: "Worth Dying For" features the Duncan Family - Jacob Duncan (their de facto leader), his two brothers Jonas and Jasper, and Jacob's adopted son Seth - whom for twenty-five years have ruled over a Nebraska farming town like tin pot dictators. Through their trucking business, the Duncans run a brutal extortion racket forcing all the local businesses and families into exclusively using their trucks or else face a visit from their muscle (comprised of former Cornhusker football players) who will beat them or their families senseless and destroy their homes. They likewise terrorise anyone who dares do anything they disagree with, even forbidding the local doctor from treating Seth's wife Elenore after Seth beats her. However, this is merely the tip of the iceberg of the Duncan's depravity, with them secretly in partnership with Rossi, a Mafia boss based in Las Vegas and his contacts of Lebanese and Iranian gangsters. Together they run an operation using the Duncan's infrastructure to smuggle women and girls out of the heart of Asia into America, where Rossi forces the women into prostitution and the Duncan's keep a portion of the children for themselves to rape, eventually killing them when they get bored with them.
• Self-Disposing Villain: A few times, but most notably with The Albanian gang. in Blue Moon, although it was paranoia sown by Reacher's activities that made them distrust each other to the point of a shoot-out.
• Serial Killings, Specific Target:
  • In The Visitor (known as Running Blind in the States), Reacher is taken in by the FBI because he matches the criminal profile of a currently active serial killer, but cleared of suspicion almost immediately and forced to aid in the search of the real killer. The twist in the end is that the killer was The Profiler herself, whose real target was her stepsister. She had deliberately chosen the other victims so she could plausibly fabricate a profile pointing to someone with an entirely different kind of motivation.
  • In One Shot, the antagonists murder their intended target and several bystanders, planting evidence to make it look like a random mass shooting by a disgruntled veteran.
• Said Bookism: Averted. Even the Author Catchphrase has the word "said" in it. You can find "said" after countless lines of dialogue, ranging from questions to back-and-forth conversations.
• Sherlock Scan:
  • Reacher is pretty good at these, probably due to his wide range of experience as a former military policeman. More than one reviewer has described him as a sort of modern-day Sherlock Holmes.
  • In Personal, one character who has known him and his lifestyle a long time in fact refers to him as 'Sherlock Homeless'.
• Shoe Phone: In Persuader, Reacher starts off with an actual texting device concealed in his shoe.
• Shoot the Builder: In Die Trying, Beau Borken commissions an underground bunker to hold the president's goddaughter prisoner, then kills five of the contractors and locks the sixth inside, promising to dismember him alive unless he gets out by the morning. There is no way out, although the worker breaks off his fingernails trying to find one. Beau then dismembers the worker, satisfied that his secret is safe, and that if one of the men who built the room couldn't get out, then his prisoner won't be able to either.
• Shown Their Work: While the books are not infallible, Child has strong knowledge of the military and its strategy, and lets you know it.
• Signature Move: Reacher's favorite move is a headbutt to catch opponents off guard and he tends to favor eye gouging, knee and elbow strikes and blows to the stomach and groin.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Reacher's general fighting style basically amounts to being as quick, simple and brutal as possible and he takes most heavily from Krav Maga, Aikido, Judo, Muay Thai and Jeet Kune Do, all of which emphasize simplicity and efficiency.
• Sociopathic Hero: Reacher is a mixed example. He's certainly not a sociopath as he has tremendous empathy for those he sees suffering and can't stop himself from helping but he's utterly ruthless and has expressed that he has no remorse at all for the shady things he's done, up to and including killing bad guys in cold blood.
• Someday This Will Come in Handy: In Echo Burning, Reacher sees diesel engines on concrete pads being used to run irrigation systems. The narration takes the time to describe them and Carmen explains how they work, but they don't end up relevant to the story. Fifteen books later in Make Me, this knowledge finally pays off, as Reacher remembers it and it allows him to spot the thread; namely, that the villain's "diesel fumes for assisted suicide" is a cover for something more sinister, as they don't have the right setup to make it happen the way they describe it.
• Socially Awkward Hero: While he's quite charismatic, Reacher is often perplexed by non-military social norms and cultural customs.
• The Sociopath:
  • Quite a few villains from the series fall into this category, but special mention goes to Victor Hobie a.k.a. Carl Allen, who is specifically described as simply not feeling anything, for better or for worse.
  • Reacher himself could also be considered this, as in The Hard Way the narration notes that "the remorse gene" does not exist in his DNA. As we see in 61 Hours, when people Reacher met are killed, this isn't entirely true. The Big Bad is a complete sociopath, to contrast with Reacher.
  • Mark Reacher, a distance cousin of Jack Reacher, from Past Tense seems like this, trying to make every decision dispassionately. He had no qualms killing his own teammates.
• Southern Gothic Satan: In many of the novels, there is a Town with a Dark Secret and Jack, with his almost supernatural size, strength, fighting skills, and detective ability just happens to wander through and, upon receiving some sort of threat or attack by a town member, decides to stick around to find out just what's going on and bring everyone to justice.
• Stealth Pun: A rare serious example by Jodie in Tripwire when, making a phone call under duress, she begins the call by saying "Hi, Jack". She hopes that he will understand that she is being "hijacked" and forced to make the call, although she's also trying to invoke You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious since she normally refers to him as "Reacher."
• Stepping Out for a Quick Cup of Coffee: In Echo Burning, Alice Amanda Aaron does this for Reacher.
• Strictly Formula: The novels follow a very distinct pattern of Reacher being on the road and either coming across trouble randomly or being called to help someone from his past, being faced with obstructive authorities who are implied to know more than they're letting on, investigating and leaving a lot of broken or dead bodies in his wake, striking up an unlikely friendship with an initial enemy he's come to know and respect and walking off to have another adventure by the end.
• Strong and Skilled: Reacher is extremely strong, highly trained, and has decades of experience in hand-to-hand combat. This is especially notable in the times when he goes up against someone his size or larger, frequently winning due to superior fighting skill.
• Suicide by Cop: Invoked in Worth Dying For by Eldridge Tyler. Reacher's narration refers to the phenomenon by name.
• Super-Detailed Fight Narration: Without exception. Every fight scene in the series will take at least three times as long to read out loud as it would take to occur.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Just because you know how knock out somebody, does not mean that they'll always get knocked out. In "Die Trying", Leon Garber tries to knock out a member of the militia who kidnapped an FBI agent with a rock, only to end up braining the guy and severing his spinal cord. Then, in the book Running Blind, Reacher, who had earlier boasted that he knows how to not kill somebody unless he wants to, accidentally murders the Big Bad, by punching her so hard in the head, that he breaks her neck.
  • Reacher settles in with a love interest at the end of one book, but since he's so accustomed to his roaming ways, he goes back to traveling by the next one.
  • In Persuader, after killing Paulie, Reacher has a DEA agent man a makeshift machine gun turret while he and the two other DEA agents find out where the guns and a missing agent who the Big Bad intends to sell as a sex slave are. Unfortunately, when they get back, the agent has been killed and the bad guys are having their meeting as planned. Reacher finds out the gun he set up (a Soviet NSV belonging to the late roided-up, henchman Paulie) hadn't being used for years, as it had been peacefully swinging on a chain to serve as a giant "don't mess with me" sign. Not being used for decades caused it to jam after one shot and lead to the agent getting taken out.
  • In Make Me, Reacher takes a blow to the side of the head, and ends up with a cerebral contusion. He tries to just 'walk it off' and power through, but after repeatedly losing his balance, forgetting people's names, and zoning out during important conversations, the Girl of the Week forces him to go to the emergency room. He is still resistant to treatment, and ends up suffering bad headaches that affect his vision and marksmanship during the final fight. Two of the people he met during the story insist on not letting him go solo, and are ultimately vital due to his handicap. Even an epic badass can be seriously hurt or outright killed by a concussion. Even at the story's end, he still needs to get continued treatment for the injury.
  • By the time of Blue Moon, Reacher is pushing 60 years old, and even he is starting to feel his age. He moves a little slower, and has to rely more on subterfuge, psychological warfare, and the element of surprise than his old brute-force methods. He also uses weapons a lot more than his fists. In fact, the plot is kicked off when he isn't quite able to catch up with a much younger mugger, and commits himself to helping the mugger's victim recover.
  • It's established regularly that while Reacher is very tough and capable, he's not superhuman and there are limits to what he can do and what he is able to survive. More than once, he's been outnumbered or facing down opponents who are heavily armed or simply outnumber him and is forced to resort to trying to separate them and take them out one at a time and that's when he doesn't simply surrender or is saved by a stroke of luck.
  • Reacher's Sherlock Holmes style ability to pick up on details and size people up quickly is impressive but like Sherlock himself, he's not always correct and can get details correct but reach the wrong conclusions and is not above biases, occasionally missing out that someone he'd previously dismissed is smarter or more dangerous than they initially seemed.
• Sympathetic Murderer: One way to look at Reacher. Child himself seems to take this view, as he is quite blunt in interviews about the fact that Reacher's actions frequently qualify as murder, but they're also almost exclusively Pay Evil unto Evil moments because the people he kills in cold blood tend to deserve it.
• Tempting Fate: The owner of the town of Despair in Nothing To Lose is so paranoid that somebody might discover his secrets that he gets the police to throw out any stranger who walks into the town on a trumped-up charge of vagrancy, even if they're just passing through or they want to get something to eat. This… really doesn't work on Reacher.
• Tap on the Head: Used on occasion.
  • In Tripwire, Reacher does it to three different people in order to acquire a firearm, and specifically pulls his punches so they won't be killed or permanently injured, just temporarily knocked out.
  • In The Visitor (Running Blind in the US), Reacher subdues a thug with three separate blows to the head. This trope is immediately lampshaded. Three blows to the head is enough to take someone out of a fight. It's also a pretty bad concussion. Later in the same novel, the Big Bad is outright killed by a punch to the head (that breaks her neck).
  • Deconstructed in Make Me, where Reacher gets pistol-whipped in the side of the head and tries to brush it off, treating it as a minor inconvenience like the trope usually goes. Instead, he ends up having to go to the emergency room, and rather than walking off into the sunset as usual, the book ends with him having to stick around because he needs more treatment and time to recover.
• The Teetoaller: Reacher is a downplayed example as he rarely drinks alcohol, preferring coffee, but does have a beer on occasion.
• Theme Naming: Subverted and played straight - on separate occasions, though.
  • In Gone Tomorrow Sansom's old friend from Special Forces alternately gives his name as Browning and Springfield—both rifle manufacturers (it's never stated which, if either, name is real). Reacher just remarks that, if all your false names follow a clear pattern, it defeats the purpose of having a false name in the first place.
  • OTOH, Reacher regularly uses the names of Yankees second basemen or obscure Presidents as aliases - this keeps away people who've only heard of him in passing, yet enables people he wants to stay in touch with like his friends in the military can find him relatively easily (except when he encounters a particularly-knowledgable character, although they're usually not involved with the Evil Plot).
• The Drifter: Reacher plays this role in many of the novels. Where there is a Town with a Dark Secret Reacher, with his almost supernatural size, strength, fighting skills, and detective ability will just happen to wander through and, upon receiving some sort of threat or attack by a town member, decide to stick around to find out just what's going on and bring everyone to justice.
• Token Good Cops:
  • In Killing Floor, half of the local eight officers are dirty and two have minimal involvement in the plot, leaving only Detective Finlay and Officer Roscoe to provide Knight Errant Reacher much aid throughout the story.
  • In 61 Hours, Police Chief Holland and his number two Peterson are skilled cops who work well with Reacher, and while many other cops have moments of professionalism and skill, every last one of them gets lured away from guarding an important witness by what Reacher views as an obvious distraction. And then there's the suspicion that a Dirty Cop is on the force, although that turns out to be a Forced into Evil but still willing to kill Holland, leaving Peterson as the token good, or at least above average, cop on the force.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: In The Hard Way Gregory is a criminal, but a nominal ally of Reacher's for most of the novel, before Reacher realizing that The Reveal hardens him due to a sense of betrayal.
• Town with a Dark Secret:
  • Margrave in Killing Floor- the entire town looks perfect, every building is immaculate and everything's clean and shiny... and yet there's virtually nobody in town, and certainly not enough people to justify the amount that must have been spent on making the town look so good. Because the local 'philanthropist' organisation is actually counterfeiting money and throwing it to everyone in the town to buy their silence.
  • Despair in Nothing To Lose, a company town that has been processing uranium without protection, resulting in a lot of people dying from radiation poisoning, while unable to do anything about it because the guy who owns the town simply doesn't care.
  • Mother's Rest in Make Me. Suicidals are lured into this town by a gang of snuff film producers who claim that they can make the suicide as painless as possible. Once there, however, the suicidals are imprisoned and forced to become victim to the gang's snuff films.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Reacher loves bacon, eggs, pancakes and black coffee (to the point where he'll go without if a bar he's visiting for plot purposes doesn't serve coffee. Although, if he's just unwinding, he will sometimes order a beer).
• Trapped Undercover: The American operative in The Sentinel.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: Willard in The Enemy.
• Uncertain Doom: The van driver in Worth Dying For, the largely absent "sixth man" of the Duncans' local accomplices and the Sole Survivor when Reacher leaves town, as he hasn't gotten back with the "merchandise" yet. Reacher suggests the townsfolk should either kill the driver or bury him alive; Eleanor shows up driving his van a few hours later, so something happened to him, but she doesn't say and Reacher doesn't ask.
• Underground Railroad: Nothing To Lose has a subplot where several locals are transporting people who deserted from the army for religious reasons away from the authorities.
• Use Your Head: Reacher's signature move is a headbutt, which he favors due to his belief that people rarely expect it in a fight.
  • He also likes it because, if done properly, it's devastatingly effective. He once likened it to getting hit full in the face by a bowling ball.
• Villain Team-Up: In Worth Dying For, three criminal bosses each send some of their men to Nebraska to help the Duncans take down Reacher. Thanks to a combination of Poor Communication Kills and all three factions having orders to eliminate the other two once Reacher is dead, the team-up doesn't last very long.
• Waxing Lyrical: In The Hard Way, Reacher and Pauling briefly quote Satisfaction lyrics at each other, in reference to Reacher's huge accumulation of random trivia.
  Reacher: A lot of useless information. Supposed to fire my imagination.
  Pauling: But you can't get no satisfaction?
• Wham Line: Any given chapter or passage from anything in the series is likely to end with one of these.
• What Have You Done for Me Lately?: Said word per word by Reacher's CO, Colonel Garber. This is important in context because it's the straw that breaks Reacher's back in the Army. After insulting an Obstructive Bureaucrat officer while investigating a serial killing involving a Special Ops major, Reacher finds himself on the Army's separation list. Garber is willing to take Reacher off the separation list, but warns Reacher that the Army will never allow Reacher to advance past his current rank. When Reacher protests, Garber asks him this question, implying it's time to get out.
• Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell: The collapse of the Berlin Wall is a major plot point in The Enemy. Most are led to assume that the cutbacks that followed in subsequent years are the implied reason Reacher left - for the real reason, see The Last DJ.
• Wife-Basher Basher: Reacher, sometimes to the point where it can kick off the plot of a novel, like in Worth Dying For. Also pops up in The Enemy, where Reacher is investigating a murder and one of his suspects, an Eastern Bloc defector, is reluctant to reveal his alibi at first. It turns out he couldn't have done the crime because he was busy spending three hours working over a wife-beater. Reacher approves.
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: This is the main motive behind Reacher's actions as his mother raised him to believe that his size, strength and physical and intellectual capabilities brought with it a responsibility to do good where he could and stand up for those weaker than him.
• You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: Invoked in Tripwire by Jodie, who (correctly) anticipates that he will realize that she is making a phone call under duress when she calls him "Jack" rather than "Reacher."

---