The Midnight Line by Lee Child

The Midnight Line: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child --- 368 pages

The Midnight Line is the 22nd Jack Reacher thriller from Lee Child, and it may well be the best one he's written to date.  As one reviewer says, this is the one that breaks your heart, as Reacher confronts the true cost of war intersecting with the opioid epidemic.

The new story begins where Make Me (2015) left off. Reacher and Michelle Chang spend three days together in Milwaukee.  On the fourth morning, when he returns to the room with coffee, she's gone. Just a note left on the pillow. And he understands why.

So he gets on a bus and heads west. At a rest stop in a small sad town in Minnesota, Reacher takes a stroll to stretch his legs, He passes a pawn shop and in the window he sees a West Point class ring from 2005. It's tiny; a woman cadet's class ring. Why would she give it up? Reacher's a West Point graduate himself. He knows how hard she worked to earn the right to wear that ring. It's not something you'd let go of easily.

Reacher decides to trace the ring back to its owner. Not just to return the ring, but to make sure she's all right. If she's okay, he'll just walk away.

But the trail he finds leads, step by step, into a web of lies, and violence, and desperation. Eventually it leads Reacher to the desolate wilds of Wyoming and a ghost of a town called Mule Crossing. Where he crosses paths with a retired FBI agent turned private investigator from Chicago. Who knows all about this woman and what might have gone wrong. Reacher has his own kind of honor.  If she's OK, he'll walk away. If she's not - he'll stop at nothing to set things right.

Reacher's on a quest for justice. Don't get in his way.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from the New York Times. 

Click HERE to read the review from the Washington Post.

Glass Houses by Louise Penny

Glass Houses: A Novel by Louise Penny --- 391 pages with Author's Note

"There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts." 
--- Mahatma Gandhi

Penny’s 13th novel featuring Chief Superintendent. Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec is as riveting a tale as Penny's many fans have come to expect. The novel opens with Gamache, the chief witness for the prosecution of a  brutal murder, being grilled by the Crown Prosecutor in a stifling hot Montreal courtroom. 

The presiding judge Maureen Corriveau, who’s trying her first homicide case, is taken aback by the animosity between the Crown Prosecutor and his own witness. She begins to suspect that something untoward is going on in her courtroom. 

The story of the murder, committed in Gamache's home village of Three Pines, is slowly revealed in flashbacks. It begins at a Halloween party, where the evening's merriment is disturbed by the presence of a silent figure robed and masked all in black. The next day the figure shows up in the middle of the village green, standing silent, motionless, and staring. And the next day, and the next. The entire village is unnerved. Then, the figure is gone, as mysteriously as it appeared. The village begins to relax --- until Madame Gamache finds a black-masked and robed body in the cellar under the village church. 

The shocking death brings back memories of other misdeeds that plagued the village in the distant past and seems to be related to Gamache's current preoccupation: the out of control opioid epidemic and the violent drug cartels fighting to control the trade are overwhelming the forces of law and order.  

All the familiar and much-loved characters from Three Pines and the Sûreté are present and each contributes in his or her own way to the shattering climax.

Click HERE to read an interview with Louise Penny from CBS News.

Click HERE to read a review from the Seattle Times.

Click HERE to read a review from the Washington Post.

Click HERE to read a review from the Christian Science Monitor.