Jack Reacher arrives in Virginia hoping to contact the woman he spoke with on the phone in "61 Hours," only to be drafted back into the Army, where he confronts life-changing elements from his past.

An old colonel goes each Friday to the post office to see if his long-awaited pension has come through. He knows it will not; so does his wife who is still grieving over the death of their son the year before. The colonel has a mission: to elevate the grim routine of poverty and failure to a high mass of defiance. He does that by showing that a heart that has been broken still beats with vengeance