[1] Jack Reacher gets off a Greyhound bus in the town of Margrave, Georgia, because he remembers his brother mentioning that a blues musician named Blind Blake had died there.

Much to his surprise, shortly after his arrival, he is arrested in a local diner for murder on the orders of the sheriff, Morrison, who falsely claims he saw Reacher leave the scene of the crime.

Suspecting that the assistant warden set them up, Reacher joins Finlay's investigation, while Hubble is presumed dead after vanishing from his house in the middle of the day.

Roscoe theorizes that the Kliners are using Margrave as a distribution hub for their counterfeit money, but this is apparently disproven when Reacher searches one of their trucks and finds it empty.

He then informs Finlay of the secret behind the Kliners' operation, which his brother had been trying to prove: in order to obtain the special paper required to make undetectable forgeries, the criminals had employed Hubble to collect hundreds of thousands of used $1 bills and send them to ports in Florida through Stoller and other drivers, whereupon they would be bleached in Venezuela to remove the ink and then used to make forged $100 bills.

Finding the criminals gone, they spring Finlay from captivity in the police station and set it on fire before locating the hostages at Kliner's warehouse.

Reacher kills a dirty cop named Baker, shoots Teale and Kliner, and sets fire to the rest of their money.