Lee Child Books in Order

Lee Child is a British New York Times bestselling thriller author and the creator of Jack Reacher, one of the best-selling action thriller series of all time. Writing under the pen name Lee Child, James Dover Grant published 29 Jack Reacher novels between 1997 and 2024, with the series now being continued by his brother Andrew Child (real name Andrew Grant). His debut, Killing Floor, won both the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best First Novel. In 2013 he received the CWA Diamond Dagger, the highest honour in British crime writing, awarded by his peers for sustained excellence. He was appointed CBE in 2019 for services to literature.

This page lists all Lee Child books in order, including the full Jack Reacher series, short stories, and the No Middle Name collection, with notes on the Andrew Child transition and the books set out of chronological order.

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Jack Reacher Series (Books in Order)

The Jack Reacher series follows former major in the US Army Military Police Corps Jack Reacher, who drifts across America after leaving the military with no fixed address, no phone, and no plan, getting into trouble wherever he lands. The formula used is usually the same: Reacher arrives somewhere new, encounters a situation that turns dangerous, and using a combination of tactical intelligence and physical force that most people around him aren’t ready for, solves the main case in town. He’s 6’5″, 250 pounds, and carries nothing but a folding toothbrush.

What made the series a phenomenon was also due to the consistency. Lee Child wrote one book a year, releasing it roughly the same month (November) from 1997 to 2019, building a long-time readership of loyal fans. His books sold over 100 million copies in 49 languages. The writing style is stark and visual, using brief, factual sentences and precise physical description, which is part of why the TV adaptation works: the books read like they’re already narrated for film.

The series gained a second wave of readers when the Amazon Prime series Reacher debuted in 2022 with Alan Ritchson in the title role, finally matching the physical attributes fans had wanted since the Tom Cruise films created such a strong division of opinion a decade earlier. Season 1 is based on Killing Floor, Season 2 on Bad Luck and Trouble.

Most books read as standalones, but publication order is the better experience for new readers, as we do learn more about Jack Reacher from book to book. The one exception is books 14–15 (61 Hours and Worth Dying For), which are a deliberate two-parter and should be read together.

A note on the chronological order: several books are set earlier in Reacher’s life than their publication date suggests. The Enemy (book 8) is set in 1990, during Reacher’s military career. The Affair (book 16) is set in 1997, just before Killing Floor. Second Son and High Heat (short stories) are also set in his younger years.

1. Killing Floor, 1997
2. Die Trying, 1998
3. Tripwire, 1999
4. The Visitor, 2000 (also titled Running Blind)
5. Echo Burning, 2001
6. Without Fail, 2002
7. Persuader, 2003
8. The Enemy, 2004
9. One Shot, 2005
10. The Hard Way, 2006
11. Bad Luck And Trouble, 2007
12. Nothing To Lose, 2007
13. James Penney’s New Identity, 2017
14. Gone Tomorrow, 2009
15. 61 Hours, 2010
16. Worth Dying For, 2010
17. Second Son, 2011
18. The Affair, 2011
19. Deep Down, 2012
20. A Wanted Man, 2012
21. High Heat, 2013
22. Never Go Back, 2013
23. Not a Drill, 2014
24. Personal, 2014
25. Good and Valuable Consideration, 2014 (with Joseph Finder)
26. Small Wars, 2015
27. Make Me, 2015
28. Night School, 2016
29. The Midnight Line, 2017
30. Too Much Time, 2018
31. Faking a Murderer, 2018
32. The Christmas Scorpion, 2018
33. Past Tense, 2018
34. The Fourth Man, 2019
35. Cleaning the Gold, 2019 (with Karin Slaughter)
36. Blue Moon, 2019
37. The Sentinel, 2020
38. Better Off Dead, 2021
39. No Plan B, 2022
40. The Secret, 2023
41. New Kid in Town, 2024
42. In Too Deep, 2024
43. Exit Strategy, 2025
44. Chain Reaction, 2026

Contributions

1. The Chopin Manuscript, 2007
2. The Copper Bracelet, 2009

Standalone Novels

• Inherit the Dead, 2013

Short Stories

• Eleven Numbers, 2025

Short Story Collections

• James Penney’s New Identity / Guy Walks Into a Bar, 2011
• Safe Enough: And Other Stories, 2024
• The Twisted Women’s Book Club, 2025

Anthologies

• Fresh Blood 3, 1999
• The Mammoth Book of Tales from the Road, 2002
• The Best British Mysteries IV, 2003
• Like a Charm: A Novel in Voices, 2004 (edited by Karin Slaughter)
• The Cocaine Chronicles, 2005
• Greatest Hits: Original Stories of Hitmen, Hired Guns, and Private Eyes, 2005
• Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night, 2006 (edited by James Patterson)
• Death Do Us Part: New Stories about Love, Lust, and Murder, 2006
• Killer Year, 2008 (edited by Lee Child)
• Bloodlines: A Horse Racing Anthology, 2008
• The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries, 2008
• The Lineup: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives, 2009
• Phoenix Noir, 2009
• The Dark End Of The Street, 2010 (edited by Jonathan Santlofer)
• First Thrills, 2010 (edited by Lee Child, foreword by Steve Berry)
• Agents of Treachery, 2010
• The Penguin Book of Crime Stories, Volume II, 2010 (edited by Peter Robinson)
• The Best American Mystery Stories 2010, 2010
• First Thrills: Volume 2, 2011 (edited by Lee Child, foreword by Steve Berry)
• A Study in Sherlock, 2011
• Mystery Writers of America Presents The Rich and the Dead, 2011
• Vengeance, 2012 (edited and introduced by Lee Child)
• The Interrogator And Other Criminally Good Fiction, 2012
• The Marijuana Chronicles, 2013
• The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10, 2013
• USA Noir, 2013
• Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11, 2014
• Belfast Noir, 2014
• FaceOff, 2014
• The Mystery Writers of America Cookbook, 2015
• Manhattan Mayhem, 2015
• The Best American Mystery Stories 2015, 2015 (edited by James Patterson and Otton Penzler)
• In Sunlight or In Shadow, 2016
• The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, 2017
• No Middle Name: The Complete Collected Jack Reacher Stories, 2017
• The MatchUp Collection, 2017 (author edited)
• Anatomy of Innocence, 2017
• Alive in Shape and Color, 2017
• Ten Year Stretch: Celebrating a Decade of Crime Fiction and CrimeFest, 2018
• It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art, 2018 (edited by Jonathan Santlofer)
• Love Is Murder, 2018 (edited by Sandra Brown)
• The Best American Mystery Stories 2018, 2018
• Exit Wounds, 2019
• Invisible Blood, 2019
• Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night, 2019
• The Big Book of Espionage, 2020
• Deadly Anniversaries, 2020
• Dear NHS, 2020
• The Nicotine Chronicles, 2020
• The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year: 2021 (edited by Lee Child and Otto Penzler)
• Killer Year: Stories to Die For, 2021
• An Unnecessary Assassin, 2023
• Crimebits: 100 Opening Gambits for Great Thrillers & Linked Mystery Puzzles, 2024
• Birds, Strangers and Psychos, 2025

Non-Fiction Books

• Jack Reacher’s Rules, 2011
• The Hero, 2019
• How To Write a Mystery, 2021 (with Laurie R King)
• Jack Reacher: A Mysterious Profile, 2022

Lee Child Biography

Lee Child is a British thriller author best known for creating Jack Reacher. He has published 29 novels in the series, alongside short fiction and a story collection, since the debut in 1997.
Official website: jackreacher.com

Lee Child was born on 29 October 1954 in Coventry, England, under the name James Dover Grant. He grew up in Birmingham and studied at King Edward’s School, the same school J.R.R. Tolkien once attended. In 1974, he attended law school at Sheffield University, graduating in 1977, though he never practiced law.

In the mid-1970s, he worked various odd jobs, including at a cardboard box factory and a Lyons Maid factory, and Granada TV in Manchester, where he remained for 18 years as a presentation director.

He was made redundant in 1995, at the age of 40, after corporate restructuring at Granada. With no publishing background and no contacts in the industry, he bought a notepad and wrote Killing Floor, which became the first Jack Reacher novel, by hand. The book was published in 1997 and won both the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best First Novel, an unusual double win for a debut. It was also shortlisted for the Macavity Award and the Dilys Award. Lee Child described his two muses during that period as “fear and hunger.”

The series gained market recognition fast and grew into one of the best-selling thriller franchises in the world, with over 100 million copies sold across 49 languages. Lee Child maintained an annual publication schedule with accurate consistency, missing only once (two books appeared in 2010 instead). He became a transatlantic number one, becoming #1 on both the New York Times and the Sunday Times bestseller lists.

In 2013, Lee Child received the CWA Diamond Dagger, the highest award in British crime writing, voted for by fellow CWA members and recognizing a career marked by sustained excellence. Earlier recipients include Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, and Ian Rankin. In 2019 he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to literature. The Bookseller also named him Author of the Year in 2019.

The pen name itself has a story. “Lee” came from a family joke involving the mispronunciation of Renault’s “Le Car.” “Child” was chosen to place his books alphabetically between Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie on bookshop shelves. This was a calculated move that shows just how carefully he thought about the business of publishing from the very beginning.

Starting with The Sentinel in 2020, Lee Child began handing over the series to his younger brother Andrew Grant, who writes under the pen name Andrew Child. The handover was gradual. The two brothers co-credited the books while Andrew was, by Lee’s own later admission to USA Today, writing them solo from the start, with Lee mostly handling the promotion of the books. In Too Deep (2024) was Andrew’s first fully solo book, and with Exit Strategy (2025) Lee officially stepped back entirely from the series. “It’s all his now,” he told USA Today. He described his original ambition as always having been “to give the character away.”

Lee Child lives in New York and the south of France.

Lee Child Book Adaptations

• One Shot – adapted into the movie Jack Reacher (2012)
• Never Go Back – adapted into the movie Never Go Back (2016)
• Jack Reacher series – adapted into the Amazon Prime television series Reacher (2022-2026)

Lee Child Awards and Honors

Lee Child has received multiple major crime and thriller awards around the world, including debut awards, best novel prizes and lifetime achievement honors. The list below highlights key awards and also includes a full record of wins and nominations.

Major Awards and Honors

• Killing Floor – Barry Award for Best First Novel (1998)
• Killing Floor – Anthony Award for Best First Novel (1998)
• The Enemy – Nero Award (2005)
• The Enemy – Barry Award for Best Novel (2005)
• 61 Hours – Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year (2011)
• CWA Diamond Dagger (2013)
• Thrillermaster Award (2017)
• Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award (2017)
• British Book Award: Author of the Year (2019)
• Edgar Award Grandmaser (2026)

Awards (Full List)

Nominations and Shortlists

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