While you wait for Prime Video’s Reacher Season 3, check out Jack’s literary crossovers with Temperance Brannan (“Bones”) and Will Trent.
Reacher is currently one of the most popular TV series on streaming. Bones was a hit crime procedural series that ran for twelve seasons on Fox. Will Trent is the most recent hit cop show on ABC. Well, guess what? If you’re reading this, you already know at least one, two, or all three series. If you’re a book reader, you might have noticed that in two separate instances, Jack Reacher met Temperance Brannan from Bones and teamed up with Will Trent.
Author and creator Lee Child edited and contributed to a 2017 anthology where crime writers were invited to collaborate and write stories where their most popular book characters met up to solve a crime. Child wrote “Faking a Murderer” with Kathy Reichs: “When speaking at a conference in Washington D. C., the last thing forensic expert Dr Temperance Brannan expects is to become a suspect in a murder investigation. When ex-military nomad Jack Reacher hears of Brannan’s predicament, he comes to her aid. This unstoppable pair team up for the time ever to clear Brannan’s name and find the real killer.”
Cover art: Simon & Schuster
“Faking a Murderer” is a short story where Brennan gets investigated for wrongdoing, but Jack Reacher comes on the scene with vital information that helps her case. The short story is now available as a standalone ebook.
Cover art: William MorrowIn 2020, Lee Child and Karin Slaughter co-wrote “Cleaning the Gold,” a novella where Jack Reacher and Will Trent meet by chance when both are undercover and quickly team up: “Will Trent is undercover at Fort Knox. His assignment: to investigate a twenty-two-year-old murder. His suspect’s name: Jack Reacher. Jack Reacher is in Fort Knox on his own mission: to bring down a dangerous criminal ring operating at the heart of America’s military. Except now Will Trent is on the scene. But there’s a bigger conspiracy at play – one that neither the special agent nor the ex-military cop could have anticipated. And the only option is for Jack Reacher and Will Trent to team up and play nicely. If they can…”
I’ll be perfectly honest here: for me, the main attraction is always Jack Reacher. His entrance makes every story better because he’s a ticking bomb that will go off when needed. Reacher is a very large man with an unexpectedly large brain, but it’s not j his deductive powers that’s the draw but his ability to beat the crap out of anyone and everyone. It’s not a Reacher story if he’s not going to pummel someone into a pulp – not that he wouldn’t prefer folks to cooperate. It’s not surprising that these stories are relatively short because when Reacher shows up, he tends to figure things out very quickly and then take out the bad guys very quickly. Reacher is like dropping a nuke into someone else’s story – in this case, Brannan’s and Will Trent’s. But that’s the fun of Reacher, after all. If you’re a completist or jonesing for more before the next season of Reacher, you could do worse than these fun crossovers as well as the more than twenty novels.
People say any story gets better when you drop ninjas or zombies in them. You can add Jack Reacher to that list.
