Second Son_ A Reacher Story - Lee Child [1]
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Praise for THE HARD WAY
“The best thriller writer of the moment.”
—The New York Times
“Jack Reacher, the tough-minded hero of a series of bestselling noir thrillers, has all the elements that have made this genre so popular among men for decades. He travels the country dispensing his own form of justice, often violently and without remorse.… Reacher is doing something surprising: winning the hearts of many women readers.”
—The Wall Street Journal
Praise for ONE SHOT
“Ranks in the first tier … Before it’s all, vividly, over, one feels confident that Reacher—smart, rootless, and brave—will not only get his man but make him suffer.”
—The New Yorker
By Lee Child
Killing Floor
Die Trying
Tripwire
Running Blind
Echo Burning
Without Fail
Persuader
The Enemy
One Shot
The Hard Way
Bad Luck and Trouble
Nothing to Lose
Gone Tomorrow
61 Hours
Worth Dying For
And look for
THE AFFAIR
Coming in hardcover and eBook
September 2011 from Delacorte Press
Read an excerpt at the end of this eBook
Second Son is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
2011 Delacorte Press eBook Original
Copyright © 2011 by Lee Child
Excerpt from The Affair © 2011 by Lee Child
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52972-5
Cover design: Carlos Beltran
www.bantamdell.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Excerpt from The Affair
CHAPTER ONE
On a hot August Thursday in 1974, an old man in Paris did something he had never done before: he woke up in the morning, but he didn’t get out of bed. He couldn’t. His name was Laurent Moutier, and he had felt pretty bad for ten days and really lousy for seven. His arms and legs felt thin and weak and his chest felt like it was full of setting concrete. He knew what was happening. He had been a furniture repairman by trade, and he had become what customers sometimes brought him: a wormy old heirloom weakened and rotted beyond hope. There was no single thing wrong with him. Everything was failing all at once. Nothing to be done. Inevitable. So he lay patient and wheezing and waited for his housekeeper.
She came in at ten o’clock and showed no great shock or surprise. Most of her clients were old, and they came and went with regularity. She called the doctor, and at one point, clearly in answer to a question about his age, Moutier heard her say “Ninety,” in a resigned yet satisfied way, a way that spoke volumes, as if it was a whole paragraph in one word. It reminded him of standing in his workshop, breathing dust and glue and varnish, looking at some abject crumbly cabinet and saying, “Well now, let’s see,” when really his mind had already moved on to getting rid of it.
A house call was arranged for later in the day, but then as if to confirm the unspoken diagnosis the housekeeper asked Moutier for his address book, so she could call his immediate family. Moutier had an address book but no immediate