A wanted man

A Wanted Man is a crime novel by the British writer Lee Child, published in 2012. It is one of the Jack Reacher novels, and it reached the New York Times bestseller list on publication.

Reacher travels without a car, a home or a plan, and the way he gets from one part of the country to another is by accepting lifts from strangers. The lift he takes at the start of this book is unusual even by his standards: a car containing three people who are not together in any ordinary sense, with a story that does not fit what he can see of them. He says nothing and watches, and the journey ends with him drawn into an operation much larger than the people in the car, involving a murder investigation and a set of men who have arranged things so that no single person knows the whole plan. When his part in it becomes obvious, the people behind the operation begin treating him as something to be dealt with rather than a passenger.

Child's series depends on its hero being able to work out a situation from small details and then act on it without any official standing, and this novel gives him a long car journey in which to do the first part.