The Midnight Line

The Midnight Line is a thriller by the British writer Lee Child, published in 2017. It is one of the novels about Jack Reacher, a former military policeman who travels the United States with no fixed address and a habit of intervening in other people's problems.

The book starts with an object rather than a crime. Reacher, walking through a town he has no reason to stay in, notices a West Point class ring in a pawnbroker's window. The graduating year is 2005, which means the owner served in Iraq and then Afghanistan, and the size and the engraving tell him it belonged to a woman.

Finding her takes him across the upper Midwest, from bars on the poor side of small towns to a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, and brings him up against bikers, police officers, criminals and a private investigator who wears a suit. Because the ring is a piece of evidence about somebody's life, the search turns into a question about what happened to her and why nobody has been looking, and the answer is not one of the ones Reacher expected.