Excerpt from Past Tense

Are you remembering to take time to enjoy the season? It’s easy to get stressed out by all of the expectations and trying to cram everything into a few short days. I hope you are taking time for your family and your own balance.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.

Jack Reacher is always one of my favorites. Last week I picked up Past Tense by Lee Child, and I am enjoying it as usual. This one is slightly different in that there are two parallel stories running, and they have into yet intersected, but I am at the point where they should soon. One story is about Reacher and another is about a Canadian couple, and I have enjoyed a few asides about them behaving a certain way because “they were Canadian.” I’m always interested in how people see the differences in Canadian and US culture.

It would be an epic road trip, and one he hadn’t made in years. 
He was looking forward to it. 
He didn’t get far.

Lee Child, Past Tense

Jack Reacher hits the pavement and sticks out his thumb. He plans to follow the sun on an epic trip across America, from Maine to California. He doesn’t get far. On a country road deep in the New England woods, he sees a sign to a place he has never been: the town where his father was born. He thinks, What’s one extra day? He takes the detour.

At the same moment, in the same isolated area, a car breaks down. Two young Canadians had been on their way to New York City to sell a treasure. Now they’re stranded at a lonely motel in the middle of nowhere. The owners seem almost too friendly. It’s a strange place, but it’s all there is.

The next morning, in the city clerk’s office, Reacher asks about the old family home. He’s told no one named Reacher ever lived in town. He’s always known his father left and never returned, but now Reacher wonders, Was he ever there in the first place?

As Reacher explores his father’s life, and as the Canadians face lethal dangers, strands of different stories begin to merge. Then Reacher makes a shocking discovery: The present can be tough, but the past can be tense . . . and deadly.

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