Past Tense

Author/Guide: Lee Child

Why a Booktrail?

2018: Jack Reacher is on a roadtrip but he takes a deadly detour….

ISBN: 978-0593078198
Genre: Crime, Thriller

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What you need to know before your trail

Jack Reacher plans to follow the autumn sun on an epic road 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 very same moment, close by, a car breaks down. Two young Canadians are trying to get to New York City to sell a treasure. They’re stranded at a lonely motel in the middle of nowhere. 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 that town. He knows his father never went back. Now he wonders, was he ever there in the first place?

Locations

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Travel Guide

Laconia, New Hampshire

Laconia is a city situated between Lake Winnipesaukee and Winnisquam Lake. It seems to be a city of festivals from the famous ‘bike week’, one of the country’s largest rallies, and a dog sled race in the winter. It is not known if Jack Reacher would ever consider these kinds of festivals or was involved in them growing up.

Reacher’s Laconia

What starts out as a road trip from Maine all the way across the states to San Diego ( it is Jack Reacher after all) becomes something else very quickly. Jack literally comes to a crossroads and decides to head back to the town where his father lived – Laconia, in New Hampshire.

There is plenty of history here too :

“Laconia New Hampshire.
A name Reacher knew. He had seen it on all kinds of historical family paperwork, and whe had heard it mentioned from time to time. It was his late father’s place of birth, and where he was raised, until he escaped at age seventeen to join the Marines. Such was the vague family legend.”

“Escape from what had not been specified. But he never went back. Not once. Reacher himself had been born more than fifteen years later, buy which time Laconia was a dead detail of the long-ago past, as remote as the Dakota Territory where it was said some earlier ancesor had lved and worked. No one in the family ever went to either place.”