The Visitor

The Visitor is the fourth book in the Jack Reacher series written by Lee Child. It was published in 2000 by Bantam Press in the United Kingdom, and in the United States it was released under the title Running Blind. It is written in the second and third person.

The premise places Reacher inside the profile of the killer rather than outside it. The two dead women had both been acquainted with him and both had been forced to leave the service, and the manner of their deaths points to a former soldier, so his position in the investigation is compromised from the outset, which is the complication the novel runs on. Both women had been army high-flyers who were forced to resign, and both were found dead in their own homes, in a bath full of paint.

The prologue gives a killer's reasoning about knowledge and power before the investigation begins, which is a device the series uses to establish the antagonist's logic without naming them. In the novel, Reacher has to catch a murderer who leaves no forensic traces, so the case advances through interviews and inference rather than through physical evidence.