He wants to know what happened that night, and, more importantly, why the Pentagon staffer Susan Mark left DC and killed herself on that subway car.

Reacher is repeatedly and emphatically warned off the case, but his guilt over possibly triggering the poor woman's suicide won't let him rest until he has pursued the mystery all the way to the very end.

In a world gone grey with moral and ethical relativism only Jack Reacher stubbornly sticks to his high standards, no matter what the personal cost.

Molina is a star football player for USC who drops off the radar at the same time his mother kills herself.

After a trip to meet with the Sansoms at a fundraising event in his district, Reacher identifies a tail waiting for him back in New York.

She tells Reacher that Susan was her friend and was helping the Hoths investigate the circumstances around the deaths of Svetlana's husband, Grigori, and her brother during the Soviet-Afghan War.

While returning to the Hoths’ hotel for a follow-up meeting, Reacher is abducted by the federal agents that had previously warned him off the case.

It turns out that Sansom had a photo taken of him with Osama Bin Laden as part of the efforts of the USA to help the Mujahedeen fight the Soviets.

Mark loaded the information on a memory card and deleted the original file from the Pentagon computers.

Despite being chased by federal agents and Lila's crew, Reacher finds the building where the Hoths are hiding.

Once he has stripped to his boxers, they tell Reacher they are going to cut him to pieces and put the gun away, each now holding a knife.

His lone-wolf habits and brusque, technophobic decodings of the world are always a pleasure, though how he maintains fighting fitness on a diet of pancakes, bacon and coffee is one of the world's great mysteries.Gone Tomorrow has a surprisingly retro flavour, captured in Reacher's line "roll the clock back".

And there is something nostalgically neolithic about Reacher himself, a nomadic hunter-gatherer who can only be stopped by an anaesthetic dart-gun originally aimed at gorillas.