Night School

Night School is a thriller by Lee Child, published in 2016 and the twenty-first novel about Jack Reacher. Unlike most of the series, it is written in the third person rather than as Reacher's own account.

The year is 1996 and Reacher is still in the army when his superior officer orders him to attend a course in inter-agency cooperation alongside Casey Watterman of the FBI and John White of the CIA. All three are first-rate operators, and none of them can see what a classroom has to do with anything. The school turns out to be cover for an operation run out of the National Security Advisor's office: a source has reported that a Middle Eastern sleeper cell in Hamburg has agreed to pay an unidentified American a hundred million dollars, and the three men are ordered to establish who he is and what he is selling. Reacher brings in Frances Neagley, his former sergeant, and the trail leads them to Hamburg.

Child writes procedurally, letting the investigation carry the story rather than the set pieces, and this volume fills in a period of Reacher's career that the later books only refer to.