Second Son by Lee Child Page A

plotting with characters who continually surprise us with their depth.”
    —
Booklist
(starred review)
    “Perhaps there are action-lit writers more recognizable than Child, but the bet is that none of them will turn in a tighter-plotted, richer-peopled, faster-paced page-turner this year.”
    —
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)
    Praise for THE HARD WAY
    “The best thriller writer of the moment.”
    —
The New York Times
    “Jack Reacher, the tough-minded hero of a series of bestselling noir thrillers, has all the elements that have made this genre so popular among men for decades. He travels the country dispensing his own form of justice, often violently and without remorse.… Reacher is doing something surprising: winning the hearts of many women readers.”
    —
The Wall Street Journal
    Praise for ONE SHOT
    “Ranks in the first tier … Before it’s all, vividly, over, one feels confident that Reacher—smart, rootless, and brave—will not only get his man but make him suffer.”
    —
The New Yorker

By Lee Child
    Killing Floor
    Die Trying
    Tripwire
    Running Blind
    Echo Burning
    Without Fail
    Persuader
    The Enemy
    One Shot
    The Hard Way
    Bad Luck and Trouble
    Nothing to Lose
    Gone Tomorrow
    61 Hours
    Worth Dying For
    And look for
    THE AFFAIR
    Coming in hardcover and eBook
September 2011 from Delacorte Press
    Read an excerpt at the end of this eBook



Second Son
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
    2011 Delacorte Press eBook Original
    Copyright © 2011 by Lee Child
Excerpt from
The Affair
© 2011 by Lee Child
    All rights reserved.
    Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
    D ELACORTE P RESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
    eISBN: 978-0-345-52972-5
    Cover design: Carlos Beltran
    www.bantamdell.com
    v3.1

CHAPTER ONE
    On a hot August Thursday in 1974, an old man in Paris did something he had never done before: he woke up in the morning, but he didn’t get out of bed. He couldn’t. His name was Laurent Moutier, and he had felt pretty bad for ten days and really lousy for seven. His arms and legs felt thin and weak and his chest felt like it was full of setting concrete. He knew what was happening. He had been a furniture repairman by trade, and he had become what customers sometimes brought him: a wormy old heirloom weakened and rotted beyond hope. There was no single thing wrong with him. Everything was failing all at once. Nothing to be done. Inevitable. So he lay patient and wheezing and waited for his housekeeper.
    She came in at ten o’clock and showed no great shock or surprise. Most of her clients were old, and they came and went with regularity. She called the doctor, and at one point, clearly in answer to a question about his age, Moutier heard her say “Ninety,” in a resigned yet satisfied way, a way that spoke volumes, as if it was a whole paragraph in one word. It reminded him of standing in his workshop, breathing dust and glue and varnish, looking at some abject crumbly cabinet and saying, “Well now, let’s see,” when really his mind had already moved on to getting rid of it.
    A house call was arranged for later in the day, but then as if to confirm the unspoken diagnosis the housekeeper asked Moutier for his address book, so she could call his immediate family. Moutier had an address book but no immediate family beyond his only daughter Josephine, but even so she filled most of the book by herself, because she moved a lot. Page after page was full of crossed-out box numbers and long strange foreign phone numbers. The housekeeper dialed the last of them and heard the whine and echo of great distances, and then she heard a