The Secret

Jack Reacher, Book 28

By: Lee Child, Andrew Child

Narrated by: Jeff Harding

Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Chicago. 1992. A hospital patient wakes to find two strangers by his bed.

They show him a list of names and ask a simple but impossible question. Minutes later he falls to his death from his twelfth-floor window - a fall which generates some unexpected attention.

That attention comes from the Secretary of Defense, who calls for an inter-agency task force to investigate. Jack Reacher, recently demoted from Major, is assigned as the Army's representative. If he gets a result, great. If not, he's a convenient fall guy.

Reacher may be an exceptional military investigator, but office politics aren't what gets him up in the morning. As he races to identify a cold-blooded killer and uncover a secret that stretches back 23 years, he must navigate around his new partners.

Will Reacher bring the bad guys to justice the official way...or his way?

Although the Jack Reacher novels can be listened to in any order, The Secret is the 28th book in the internationally bestselling series.

©2023 Lee Child and Andrew Child (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

'There's only one Jack Reacher. Accept no substitutes.' MICK HERRON

'Jack Reacher is today's James Bond, a thriller hero we can't get enough of.' KEN FOLLETT

Convenience

Nice to be read to when your eyes are tired very nice to have whenever you need it.

Were is Reacher.

A realy good story. I looking for more of Reachers fights.
But a realy good tempo in this book as in all Recher books.
You don't want to stop reading / listening.

an improvement

easily andrews best effort so far. still middling compared to reacher books generally though. still heavier on dialogue and easy to discern the difference between lee and andrews writing. not one of jeff hardings best reads either, didn't love the choices for character voices

Fantastic

As with all Jack Reacher, he is the ideal man from a justice perspective and a dream of a such a good person

Formulaic and predictable

I’ve read or listened to all of the Reacher books and I was entertained to a degree.

This is no Killing Floor statement read and found it sub par compared to others in the series.

It’s ok.

A different Reacher

Where is the old Reacher. This one is a bit of a woke one. I still liked it as I am a Reacher tragic but bring back the real Reacher please.

Meh. Mediocre. Mostly boring.

Not the best Reacher story. A little too predictable. I bought this one to get me through a long-flight and at that low standard it mostly did the job.

Having said that, the narrator did a truly awful job. Someone else noted that it sounded as though he were reading every sentence from a list and that is true. A list of stomach viruses that you're trying to avoid.

And the "voices", the voices! I would much prefer it he hadn't try to act out the voices. The women all sound exactly the same, like badly designed AI voices, heard through a teeny speaker that's been scratched. The men weren't much better, either.

Actors like to say that "if it ain't on the page it ain't on the stage," and that is largely true. But even this dog's breakfast of a book deserved a better reading.

Not as good as they used to be...

Lee Child must start to run out of ideas and lost his touch. Would recommend read all other Reacher books before picking this one.

This was a tough nail to finish

Read/heard all of the others, looked forward to this. Initial 2-3h the narrator read every sentence as it was from a list, emphasizing the last word. Not to my liking. Almost gave up in the book, and now I wished I had.

Disappointing

I’ve listened to a number of Jack Reacher thrillers and have really enjoyed them. For that reason I purchased this novel only to be disappointed. Not Child’s best.