Long Island LitFest presents Jack Reacher author Lee Child
The concept of the knight errant—a character that wanders the land in search of adventures framed by a desire to right wrongs or assert his chivalric ideals—dates back to medieval times. That definition perfectly describes Jack Reacher, the fictional creation of author Lee Child, who has used him as the crux of 23 novels dating back to his debut, 1997’s Killing Floor.
Reacher is a former Army MP who roams the country with nothing more than a folding toothbrush, an ATM card and an expired passport on his person. The hulking 6’5″ nomad reappears in the recently published Past Tense, a novel centered on its protagonist’s return to the hometown of his late father. There, he finds that nefarious doings are going on in the municipality’s outskirts—but no record of his family having resided there exists.
