Make Me

Finished November 18
Make Me by Lee Child, read by Dick Hill

Classic Reacher here, wandering into a small town on a whim because of its name, finding something wrong, and, even though it would be easy to walk away, he doesn't. The town is called Mother's Rest, and it lies out in the middle of the prairie. To Reacher, it evokes images of a wagon train stopping for either a new mother to rest before carrying on, or for an older woman's passing. He decides he will stop for a day, look for the historical marker that will tell him the story, and move on. He arrives by train, with Mother's Rest the only stop on the route to Chicago. As he leaves the train station, he finds a woman obviously waiting for someone with a similar build to himself, but he has been the only passenger to alight from the train.
He finds the town odd, and after wandering through the streets and even a little ways out, finds no marker to answer his imaginative musing. But he does notice more and more odd things and when he compares notes with the woman, Chang, he begins to suspect something bad has happened. When the two are threatened and forced to leave town, he is sure, and the chase for information has begun in earnest.
With the two traveling from the Midwest, to L.A., Phoenix, Chicago, and San Francisco as they follow leads, they find the trail leads deep, deeper and darker than anything they imagined.
This book does mark a change in that Reacher shows vulnerability here, something I haven't really seen for him before. It adds to the suspense, and adds to the story in an interesting way. I didn't expect just how dark this plot would get until very near the end. Unputdownable, as expected.