I’m waiting for dark.”

As I’ve mentioned before, Adam and rakkity and I are fans of the writers Michael Connelly and Lee Child. We’ve read them all, and we usually round robin the new book which can found in the Murder/Mystery/Mayhem aisle. As rakkity prepared to fly across the pond, I informed him that Lee’s newest, “Nothing to Lose,” would hit Britain’s stores first.

He sent me this synopsis of chapters one through ten written in the author’s style:

Chapter 1
Reacher is walking/busing/hitch-hiking from Maine to San Diego, and enters Colorado at the town of Hope, just inside the Kansas Border. Reacher gets a good meal there, including his favorite, a bottomless cup of coffee, and a cheap hotel to sleep in. He buys some clothes and throws the old ones away.

Chapter 2
Continuing his walk west the next morning, Reacher finds that the asphalt pavement ends at the border of Hope, where it changes to gravel in the neighboring town of Despair. He walks into town, looking for a coffee shop. He finds one, but is refused service. This puzzles Reacher, but he is ready when four tough guys approach him and tell him to leave town.

Chapter 3
Using implied and direct threats to the restaurant’s owner that he’ll mess up the restaurant with the blood and guts of the 4 above-mentioned thugs if he isn’t served coffee, Reacher gets his cup of coffee. Then he goes outside to deal with the thugs.

Chapter 4 (By now you have noticed that these chapters are really short.)
Reacher gets ready to waste the 4 thugs, but he lets them off easy by slugging only one of them, so hard he’s unconscious before hitting the ground 10 feet away.

Chapter 5
Reacher gets taken to the jailhouse for the night by the cops of Despair. In the morning, he’s released and driven to the border of Hope, where Despair’s cop warns him not to re-enter town. Reacher does not take the warning lightly.

Chapter 6
As Reacher walks into Hope, a cop car pulls up. The driver is a beautiful woman who tells Reacher about the strange town of Despair, which has the world’s largest metal re-cycling plant, and where everyone is paranoid.

Chapter 7
Reacher ignores the advice of Hope’s female cop, and buys stuff (garbage bags, flashlight, etc) to continue his westward walk through Despair, with a goal of finding out why Despair is full of misanthropes.

Chapter 8-10
Reacher sneaks into Despair in the dark, and watches all the town’s cars driving into a gigantic building. Trucks carrying metal to be re-cycled head into its vast portals. He evades the ever-circling guards, and enters the building.

(That’s as far as I got in London-Heathrow’s Borders shop yesterday.)

–Ed