The Midnight Line: (Jack Reacher 22)

Jack Reacher takes an aimless stroll past a pawn shop in a small Midwestern town. In the window he sees a West Point class ring from 2005. It's tiny. It's a woman cadet's graduation present to herself. Why would she give it up?

Reacher's a West Pointer too, and he knows what she went through to get it. Reacher tracks the ring back to its owner, step by step, down a criminal trail leading west.

Like Big Foot come out of the forest, he arrives in the deserted wilds of Wyoming. All he wants is to find the woman. If she's OK, he'll walk away. If she's not ...he'll stop at nothing. He's still shaken by the recent horrors of Make Me, and now The Midnight Line sees him set on a raw and elemental quest for simple justice.

Best advice: don't get in his way.

Waterstones have been following the nail-biting exploits of Jack Reacher since he first loped into town in Killing Floor in 1997, a striking figure standing at 6ft5 all dirty-blond hair, with a chip on his shoulder and a lethal ability. His creator Lee Child lays claim to the fact that every second somewhere in the world somebody buys one of his novels.

He starts every new novel on the same date, the 1 September, and has managed to keep fans coming back for more every time, he says of thriller-writing ‘It's the only real genre and all the other stuff has grown on the side of it like barnacles’