Nothing to Lose

About this book

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Lee Child’s The Affair . Two lonely towns in Colorado: Hope and Despair. Between them, twelve miles of empty road. Jack Reacher never turns back. It's not in his nature. All he wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets is big trouble. So in Lee Child’s electrifying new novel, Reacher—a man with no fear, no illusions, and nothing to lose—goes to war against a town that not only wants him gone, it wants him dead. It wasn’t the welcome Reacher expected. He was just passing through, minding his own business. But within minutes of his arrival a deputy is in the hospital and Reacher is back in Hope, setting up a base of operations against Despair, where a huge, seething walled-off industrial site does something nobody is supposed to see . . . where a small plane takes off every night and returns seven hours later . . . where a garrison of well-trained and well-armed military cops—the kind of soldiers Reacher once commanded—waits and watches . . . where above all two young men have disappeared and two frightened young women wait and hope for their return. Joining forces with a beautiful cop who runs Hope with a cool hand, Reacher goes up against Despair—against the deputies who try to break him and the rich man who tries to scare him—and starts to crack open the secrets, starts to expose the terrifying connection to a distant war that’s killing Americans by the thousand. Now, between a town and the man who owns it, between Reacher and his conscience, something has to give. And Reacher never gives an inch. From Publishers Weekly At the start of bestseller Child's solid 12th Jack Reacher novel (after Bad Luck and Trouble ), the ex-military policeman hitchhikes into Colorado, where he finds himself crossing the metaphorical and physical line that divides the small towns of Hope and Despair. Despair lives up to its name; all Reacher wants is a cup of coffee, but what he gets is attacked by four thugs and thrown in jail on a vagrancy charge. After he's kicked out of town, Reacher reacts in his usual manner—he goes back and whips everybody's butt and busts up the town's police force. In the process, he discovers, with the help of a good-looking lady cop from Hope, that a nearby metal processing plant is part of a plan that involves the war in Iraq and an apocalyptic sect bent on ushering in the end-time. With his powerful sense of justice, dogged determination and the physical and mental skills to overcome what to most would be overwhelming odds, Jack Reacher makes an irresistible modern knight-errant. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Starred Review Jake Reacher only rents rooms one night at a time, confirming his “absolute freedom to move on.” About the only thing sure to convince Reacher to stick around is someone telling him he has to leave. That’s what happens when the former military policeman turned inveterate loner stops for a cup of coffee in an aptly named company town called Despair, Colorado. Strangers aren’t allowed in Despair, he’s told, and two cops arrive to drive him out to the city limits. You can run Reacher out of town, maybe, but you sure as hell can’t keep him out. Forming an unlikely alliance with a female cop in the neighboring town that’s called—you guessed it—Hope, Reacher sneaks back to Despair and finds all manner of strange goings-on: the creepy burg is run by a megalomaniac entrepreneur who is using his metal-salvage business for something definitely snarky. But what? Reacher finds the answers, of course, but to do so, he pretty much has to go up against the whole damn town. What is it that makes these action-fantasies so satisfying? Yes, there is something of the cartoon superhero in Reacher’s steel-trap mind and body, but the action is so grounded in everyday details that instead of laughing it all off as silly, we find ourselves responding on a deeply emotional, archetypal level. We all

Author

Lee Child

Length

~445 pages

Reading time

8 h 52 min

Chapters

82

Released

October 22, 2026

Languages

🇬🇧 EN · 🇵🇱 PL · 🇩🇪 DE · 🇫🇷 FR · 🇪🇸 ES · 🇮🇹 IT · 🇧🇷 PT-BR · 🇲🇽 ES-MX · 🇵🇹 PT · 🇺🇦 UK · 🇨🇿 CS · 🇸🇰 SK · 🇬🇷 EL · 🇭🇺 HU · 🇹🇷 TR · 🇳🇱 NL · 🇷🇴 RO · 🇧🇬 BG · 🇭🇷 HR · 🇷🇸 SR · 🇸🇮 SL · 🇱🇹 LT · 🇱🇻 LV · 🇪🇪 ET · 🇸🇪 SV · 🇩🇰 DA · 🇳🇴 NB · 🇫🇮 FI · 🇯🇵 JA · 🇰🇷 KO · 🇨🇳 ZH · 🇹🇼 ZH-TW · 🇮🇩 ID · 🇻🇳 VI · 🇹🇭 TH · 🇮🇳 HI · 🇸🇦 AR · 🇮🇱 HE

Formats

eBook · Print edition

Print format

Paperback, 10.5 × 17.5 cm, 544 pages

ISBN

0440296978

Age rating

Mature 17+