Bad Luck and Trouble

Bad Luck and Trouble is a crime novel by the British writer Lee Child, published in 2007. It is one of the Jack Reacher novels, and it brings back the group of military investigators its central character served with.

Reacher's life since leaving the army has been spent moving from town to town with no address and no plan, and what interrupts it is a signal that only the members of his old unit could have sent. The unit was a small team of army investigators, and its former members are being hunted. One man has been sent free-falling out of a helicopter above the California desert; a woman in Chicago is working out what the deaths have in common; and Reacher, arriving in Portland, has to find out who has been killing the people he served with and why the desert matters. The book's problem-solving is the technical part of the series: the team's old habits, the codes they used, and the arithmetic of a conspiracy that Reacher works out on paper.

Child keeps the narration tightly on Reacher, so the wider investigation is assembled from what he is able to see and guess, and the loyalty of the ex-soldiers is what the plot tests.