Echo Burning

Echo Burning is a thriller by the British writer Lee Child, published in 2001 by Putnam in the United States and Bantam in the United Kingdom. It is the fifth of the Jack Reacher novels and one of the few written in the third person.

Reacher starts the book by breaking a bully's nose and finger in a Texas saloon and then discovering that the man is a local police officer; when he comes back the next day with colleagues, Reacher decides that hitchhiking is the quickest way out of town. The driver who picks him up has a problem of her own. Carmen Greer's husband has been in prison for tax evasion and is due home, and she has been looking for somebody who might kill him before he can beat her again. Reacher refuses the job, gets out of the car, and then thinks better of standing in the desert heat, and in the end he goes with her to the family ranch.

The Greers are a hard, insular family with money and local weight, and the ranch they live on is the reason nobody nearby will help her. Reacher has no badge, no client and no reason to be involved except that he is.