Without Fail

The sixth installment in Lee Child's Jack Reacher series opens with an unnamed group of assassins who attempt to kill their target with a silenced rifle shot in September and miss by an inch. The shot goes unnoticed, and the killers spend October planning a second attempt. In November, the narrative shifts to Jack Reacher, a former U.S. Army Military Police major who drifts across America. A woman sitting across from him in a booth offers him a job. He agrees, leaving with 10 days to find a way to kill the fourth-best-protected person on the planet.

Eight hours earlier, M. E. Froelich, the Secret Service agent heading Vice President-elect Brook Armstrong's protection detail, sought permission from her boss, Stuyvesant, a 25-year veteran, to bring in an outsider for a security audit. Years ago, her then-boyfriend Joe Reacher, Jack's older brother and a Treasury Department employee, had suggested hiring his younger brother to test the agency's defenses. Froelich tracked Reacher to Atlantic City, where he was helping an elderly blues singer avoid being cheated by a club manager.

Froelich reveals she once dated Joe and asks Reacher to simulate an assassination attempt against Armstrong. Reacher agrees and enlists Frances Neagley, a former Army Master Sergeant and security consultant in Chicago. Over five days, they penetrate Armstrong's security multiple times, bypassing metal detectors with a ceramic knife at a reception and reaching a church bell tower at a Bismarck, North Dakota, rally with a clear shot at Armstrong's head. The result is three definite kills and one possible. Froelich is devastated, but Reacher assures her the job is nearly impossible and she is performing it as well as anyone could.

Froelich then reveals her real reason for seeking Reacher out: The Secret Service has received two threatening messages against Armstrong. The first, mailed from Las Vegas, reads "You are going to die," printed with latex gloves and signed with a deliberate thumbprint matching no database. The second appeared mysteriously on Stuyvesant's desk: "Vice President-elect Armstrong is going to die." After verifying Reacher's and Neagley's military clearances, Stuyvesant hires them to investigate how the second message reached his office.

Suspicion falls on the cleaning crew seen on surveillance footage entering Stuyvesant's office. Additional threatening messages arrive, including one from Orlando promising a "demonstration." Reacher notices this message was mailed Friday but arrived Monday, a day earlier than expected. When midnight passes with no incident, he reasons an insider would have known the letter arrived early and acted on schedule, confirming the threat comes from outsiders.

The demonstration arrives the next day: Two unrelated men sharing Armstrong's surname are murdered in separate states by silenced weapons of types purchased by government agencies, including the Secret Service. FBI liaison agent Bannon joins the investigation and theorizes the assassins are disgruntled former Secret Service employees. Reacher disagrees but lacks the evidence to counter the theory.

Reacher reexamines the surveillance tapes and discovers the cleaning crew never planted the message. The video technician, Nendick, spliced footage from two different nights to frame them. Nendick placed the letter on Stuyvesant's desk himself, coerced by the assassins, who kidnapped his wife and mailed him her severed fingertip as proof.

During this period, Reacher stays at Froelich's house and wears Joe's abandoned suits. Froelich mistakes him for Joe and breaks down, revealing Joe broke up with her and that she harbors guilt for wishing him harm, which coincidentally came true when he was killed. They begin a relationship shadowed by unresolved grief and Froelich's fear that Reacher's aggressive instincts will get him killed the same way.

Armstrong travels to North Dakota for a second rally, and Reacher discovers the church has been infiltrated: The door is unlocked, dust in the bell tower is disturbed, and there is a smell of gun oil. A decoy rifle near the perimeter was placed to draw security while the attackers waited inside. Froelich orders an emergency extraction. Back in Washington, a message is found inside Froelich's house, her back door picked and her backup pistol stolen. The team relocates to a secure motel guarded by U.S. marshals.

On Thanksgiving Day, Armstrong insists on serving turkey at a homeless shelter. Froelich redesigns security, positioning Armstrong outdoors behind serving tables backed against a wall with sharpshooters on warehouse roofs opposite. A sniper kills agent Crosetti on one of the roofs and fires at Armstrong. Froelich leaps in front of Armstrong and takes the bullet through the neck, severing her carotid artery. Reacher holds her as she dies. In her final moments, she whispers, "I love you, Joe," mistaking him for his brother. Reacher replies, "I love you too."

Reacher recognizes the retreating shooter as the man who identified himself as a police detective in Bismarck. He reviews 94 mug shots of Bismarck officers but finds no match; all were in full uniform that day, meaning the shooter was an impersonator. Reacher builds his counter-theory around a telling detail: The second threatening message hyphenates "Vice-President," a convention abandoned in modern usage. Anyone who worked for the Secret Service would have written "Vice President" without the hyphen thousands of times, meaning neither assassin ever worked for the agency. He also deduces the thumbprint was made from an amputated thumb kept frozen and used as a stamp, which the FBI confirms after locating a victim in Sacramento.

Reacher demands a final meeting with Armstrong alone. He confronts Armstrong: Armstrong has known who is behind the threats since Election Day, when he received a broken miniature baseball bat in the mail referencing an incident from 30 years earlier. Armstrong confirms the story. When Armstrong was 18, his father caught two brothers vandalizing the family mailbox, beat them severely, and chained them to a tree. Armstrong witnessed their humiliation and the hatred in their eyes. He assumed the bat was political harassment, and the Secret Service's policy of not informing protectees about threats meant nobody asked.

Reacher lures the assassins to Froelich's memorial service in Grace, a tiny town in central Wyoming, using Armstrong's televised announcement as bait. He and Neagley spot a gold Chevy Tahoe scouting the area and, at dawn, flush it with coordinated gunfire. A violent chase across 20 miles of frozen grassland ends when the Tahoe ambushes them in a deep crevasse. The occupants are Richard and Peter Wilson, county police officers from rural Idaho, confirming Reacher's theory. Richard attempts to execute Reacher with Froelich's stolen Beretta, but the magazine springs, compressed for years, fail to feed rounds. Reacher slashes Richard with his ceramic knife; Neagley breaks free and kills Peter with his own weapon. Reacher shoots Richard through the throat, placing the bullet where Froelich took hers.

They return to Grace as snow buries the scene. When Armstrong arrives by helicopter for the memorial, Reacher hands Stuyvesant the Wilson brothers' IDs and a grocery receipt suggesting the brothers were provisioning a captive, meaning Nendick's wife may still be alive. Stuyvesant seizes the receipt and runs for the helicopter. Reacher and Neagley part at the Denver airport; she hugs him briefly, the first physical contact they have ever shared, and walks to her Chicago flight without looking back. Reacher flies to New York and visits B. B. King's club in Times Square, hoping to find the old blues singer, but she never made it there. He walks out into the night and heads for the bus terminal.