You're in the Army now, son...
 
New Year's Day, 1990. The Berlin Wall is coming down. The Cold War is ending. Soon America won't have any enemies left. The Army won't have anybody to fight. Things are going to change. Jack Reacher is the Military Police duty officer on a base in North Carolina when he takes a call reporting a dead soldier in a hot-sheets motel. Reacher tells the local cops to handle it - heart attacks happen all the time.
 
But why is Reacher in North Carolina, instead of Panama, where the action is? Then the dead man turns out to have been a two-star general who should have been in Europe. And when Reacher goes to the general's house to break the news, he finds another corpse: the general's wife. What is he dealing with here? The last echoes of the old world... or the first shocks of the new?