Persuader

Persuader is a 2003 novel by Lee Child in the Jack Reacher sequence, published by Delacorte Press as a 342-page book.

The book's premise is a bad investigation rather than a fresh crime. Ten years before, an operation went wrong and a killer escaped the consequences, and Reacher, who describes himself as a man who hates unfinished business, encounters the case again by accident. The copy distinguishes between vengeance, redemption and justice, and lets him choose the third word, which is how the series usually frames his motives. The unfinished business involves a suspected smuggler whose oriental-carpet business is a cover, and Reacher works the case unofficially with a DEA agent. He gets inside the operation by appearing to rescue the man's son from a staged kidnapping, which is the arrangement the rest of the book depends on.

Reacher's biography is stated in the jacket as a matter of absences: no family, no possessions, no commitments, and no fear. That condition is what allows him to enter a situation without the usual leverage against him, and it is also why the novels have to supply their own pressure each time.