Never Go Back

Never Go Back is the eighteenth book in the Jack Reacher series by the English writer Lee Child. It was published in the United Kingdom on 29 August 2013 and in the United States on 3 September 2013, and it continues the storyline of the novels 61 Hours, Worth Dying For and A Wanted Man.

Reacher is a former military investigator who has spent the series moving around the United States with no fixed address, and this book sends him back to a building that stands in for a home: the stone headquarters of the 110th MP Special Investigations Unit near Washington, D.C. He has come to meet Major Susan Turner in person, and instead he is told that she has been removed from her command. Her replacement, Colonel Morgan, informs him that he is under investigation in two matters, one a suspected homicide from sixteen years before and the other a lawsuit brought by a woman named Candice Dayton, who claims that an affair between her and Reacher produced her fourteen-year-old son. Reacher refuses to leave when two men confront him outside his motel, and from there the book follows him trying to establish what has happened to Turner and who has arranged the cases against him.

Child writes the series in the third person, and the plots generally begin with Reacher arriving somewhere and finding a situation that is not what it appears to be. This one differs in that the trouble starts inside the institution he used to serve.