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Audio Book (MP3) [ 522.0 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, September 5, 2006 Audio Book (MP3) [ 218.8 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, September 5, 2006 Audio Book (WMA) [ 266.2 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, September 5, 2006
I listened to the audio version of this thriller. This is just too like Dan Brown's books for me. Which is a pity because Brad Meltzer doesn't need to copy anyone. The narrator is good though.
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Adobe ePub [ 0.3 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, April 1, 2003 Adobe Digital Edition [ 0.4 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, April 1, 2003 Microsoft Reader [ 0.2 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, April 1, 2003 MobiPocket (OD) [ 0.2 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, April 1, 2003 eReader [ 0.1 Mb ] Street Date: Friday, August 23, 2002
"I know that not since the days of my childhood, when people inbooks were more real than the people one saw every day,have I found myself so moved." James Baldwin
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Audio Book (MP3) [ 246.7 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 Audio Book (WMA) [ 125.9 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Adobe ePub [ 0.5 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 3, 2008 Adobe Digital Edition [ 1.3 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 3, 2008 Microsoft Reader [ 0.4 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 3, 2008 MobiPocket (OD) [ 0.4 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 3, 2008 eReader [ 0.3 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 3, 2008
"As I was reading this latest book, I was trying to understand why I like the Reacher series so much....The Jack Reacher books are all revenge fantasies. By the time the reader encounters the first fight, the reader is already mad.... Reacher doesn't go looking for trouble, but trouble usually finds him." San Francisco Chronicle
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Chapter One The sun was only half as hot as he had known sun to be, but it was hot enough to keep him confused and dizzy. He was very weak. He had not eaten for seventy-two hours, or taken water for forty-eight.
Not weak. He was dying, and he knew it.
The images in his mind showed things drifting away. A rowboat caught in a river current, straining against a rotted rope, pulling, tugging, breaking free. His viewpoint was that of a small boy in the boat, sitting low, staring back helplessly at the bank as the dock grew smaller.
Or an airship swinging gently on a breeze, somehow breaking free of its mast, floating up and away, slowly, the boy inside seeing tiny urgent figures on the ground, waving, staring, their faces tilted upward in concern.
Then the images faded, because now words seemed more important than pictures, which was absurd, because he had never been interested in words before. But before he died he wanted to know which words were his. Which applied to him? Was he a man or a boy? He had been described both ways. Be a man, some had said. Others had been insistent: The boy's not to blame. He was old enough to vote and kill and die, which made him a man. He was too young to drink, even beer, which made him a boy. Was he brave, or a coward? He had been called both things. He had been called unhinged, disturbed, deranged, unbalanced, delusional, traumatized, all of which he understood and accepted, except unhinged. Was he supposed to be hinged? Like a door? Maybe people were doors. Maybe things passed through them. Maybe they banged in the wind. He considered the question for a long moment and then he batted the air in frustration. He was babbling like a teenager in love with weed.
Which is exactly all he had been, a year and a half before.
He fell to his knees. The sand was only half as hot as he had known sand to be, but it was hot enough to ease his chill. He fell facedown, exhausted, finally spent. He knew as certainly as he had ever known anything that if he closed his eyes he would never open them again.
But he was very tired.
So very, very tired.
More tired than a man or a boy had ever been.
He closed his eyes.
2
The line between Hope and Despair was exactly that: a line, in the road, formed where one town's blacktop finished and the other's started. Hope's highway department had used thick dark asphalt rolled smooth. Despair had a smaller municipal budget. That was clear. They had top-dressed a lumpy roadbed with hot tar and dumped gray gravel on it. Where the two surfaces met there was an inch-wide trench of no-man's-land filled with a black rubbery compound. An expansion joint. A boundary. A line. Jack Reacher stepped over it midstride and kept on walking. He paid it no attention at all.
But he remembered it later. Later, he was able to recall it in great detail.
Hope and Despair were both in Colorado. Reacher was in Colorado because two days previously he had been in Kansas, and Colorado was next to Kansas. He was making his way west and south. He had been in Calais, Maine, and had taken it into his head to cross the continent diagonally, all the way to San Diego in California. Calais was the last major place in the Northeast, San Diego was the last major place in the Southwest. One extreme to the other. The Atlantic to the Pacific, cool and damp to hot and dry. He took buses where there were any...

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