James Penney's New Identity / Guy Walks Into a Bar
These two short stories are part of the Storycuts series.
In 'James Penney's New Identity', in the dry desert of Southern California, James Penney is laid off from the plant after seventeen loyal years of service. With the threat of the bank repossessing his treasured red Firebird, he goes on the run. But why are the cops so hot on his trail? And who is the tall military policeman, built like a weightlifter, who offers him a ride?
Set just a few minutes before the terrifying opening of the bestselling Jack Reacher thriller "Gone Tomorrow, "in 'Guy Walks Into a Bar', old habits die hard for Jack Reacher. He is always on the look-out for trouble. When he stops at a bar in lower Manhattan for a late night beer and some music, his eyes are drawn to a rich young Russian girl and her bodyguard. Is she in danger? Who are those two suspicious-looking guys sitting at separate tables, watching her?
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Lee Child
Before he became the architect of modern vigilante fiction, Lee Child was a man on the brink of reinvention. In 1995, after being laid off from his job at Granada Television, he didn’t chase another corporate title. Instead, he sat down and started writing—armed with a blank page, a sharp sense of justice, and the idea of a lone drifter who didn’t belong anywhere but could set things right wherever he landed. That first story became Killing Floor. The character was Jack Reacher. And the rest is a revolution in the thriller genre.
Jack Reacher
He’s just passing through—no destination, no baggage, no need for a second chance. But when trouble brews, he doesn’t look away. He steps in. Quietly. Decisively. And once he does, nothing is ever the same again.
This is the brutal elegance of the Jack Reacher series: a world sketched in sharp edges and hard choices, where justice isn't handed down from above—it’s taken, one broken rule at a time. Each story drops you into a new setting—a forgotten town, a backroad diner, a tense urban sprawl—and strips everything down to essentials: a wrong that needs righting, and a man built to do it. The pacing is relentless, the prose spare, and the tension wired tight from the first page.
Jack Reacher consists of thirty primary books, and includes thirteen additional books that complement the series but are not considered mandatory reads and series is set to expand with the upcoming release of two more books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
