Ex-military policeman Jack Reacher returns to defend a lost man's honor. Reacher's lazy anonymity in Key West is shattered by a stranger who comes to town searching for him. Soon, the stranger is dead in a cemetery and Reacher is forced to follow the man's trail back to New York, where he finds a bewildered, elderly couple still mourning an all-American son lost in Vietnam; an alluring woman from Reacher's past; and the most vicious opponent Reacher has ever had the misfortune to face.