Jack Reacher has spent nearly three decades solving problems with a combination of detective work, an uncompromising moral code, and the occasional broken kneecap. But in Chain Reaction, the latest novel from Lee Child and Andrew Child, the former military policeman faces an unusual challenge: a conspiracy involving artificial intelligence, enormous data centers, and technology he has little interest in understanding.
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The story within Chain Reaction reunites Reacher with Susan Turner, now commanding the secretive G-99 Section, after one of her investigators is murdered. Their investigation leads to Everything Everywhere Forever (EEF), an AI startup run by Axel Brill and Saxby Cameron, whose apparent technological breakthroughs conceal a lucrative criminal operation. Speaking exclusively with Collider, the Child brothers explained the novel’s biggest twists, its villains‘ motivations, and why Reacher’s old-fashioned instincts remain his greatest advantage.
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.
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The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason.
You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error.
You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable.
You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
Who Killed John James Bisley, and Why?
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At the center of Chain Reaction is the murder of John James Bisley, an investigator who had been looking into suspicious activity surrounding five enormous data centers in Summertown, Colorado. Bisley discovered evidence that threatened to expose EEF’s operation, and his decision to investigate the facilities personally ultimately cost him his life. Andrew Child explained:
“It’s like the Sherlock Holmes thing. Once all the wrong answers are eliminated, however improbable the one that’s left has to be. And with the guy, it was so far removed from his experience, because he was all about the technological solutions. He had to actually go out and look for himself to see, could this possibly be true? And of course, that’s what got him into the incident that gets the ball rolling at the beginning of the book.”
“It’s like the Sherlock Holmes thing. Once all the wrong answers are eliminated, however improbable the one that’s left has to be. And with the guy, it was so far removed from his experience, because he was all about the technological solutions. He had to actually go out and look for himself to see, could this possibly be true? And of course, that’s what got him into the incident that gets the ball rolling at the beginning of the book.”
What Was EEF Really Doing With Its Artificial Intelligence?
Image via Prime VideoImage via Prime VideoImage via Prime VideoImage via Prime Video
EEF’s supposedly revolutionary technology conceals a scheme involving stolen work and data. Brill and Cameron aren’t interested in world domination. They’re simply exploiting investors to make themselves extraordinarily wealthy. But Reacher doesn’t care about the financial fraud; in fact, he thinks it’s fair game. The violence associated with it, however, is not. Lee Child explained:
“They’re actually not doing anything at all other than ripping people off. And Reacher says one of the lines I really like in it. Reacher says, ‘I don’t care if you’re ripping off the idiot investors. Somebody’s got to do it.’ It’s the extra step they take to defend themselves. That’s what gets Reacher mad.”
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“They’re actually not doing anything at all other than ripping people off. And Reacher says one of the lines I really like in it. Reacher says, ‘I don’t care if you’re ripping off the idiot investors. Somebody’s got to do it.’ It’s the extra step they take to defend themselves. That’s what gets Reacher mad.”
Andrew added that the brothers deliberately avoided making their villains increasingly dangerous simply to raise the stakes. “We came up with this concept we call villain inflation, because if in book one the evil villain is going to detonate a nuclear bomb in New York City, what do you then do for book two,” asked Andrew. “Do you have to have two bombs in Los Angeles, and then four bombs in DC? How do you keep it grounded so that people recognize the villain and have some kind of visceral reaction that makes them hate him?”
How Does Jack Reacher Solve the Mystery of the Five Data Centers in ‘Chain Reaction’?
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Image via Prime Video
At the heart of the novel is the revelation that the digital conspiracy, as with all technology, still needs a physical infrastructure and a solution to it. That’s where Reacher comes in, since he notices inconsistencies involving the buildings, gravel, and concealed connections between the facilities that technologically minded investigators have overlooked. Andrew explained why the solution was particularly appropriate for the character, telling Collider:
“It seemed very suitable for Reacher. His default position is analogue, and so he’s not going to be thinking in terms of IP this and gigabyte that. His natural outlook, and all those years of experience as an investigator before this technology came along, mean the idea of something being physically stolen is much more likely to occur to him than any of these technological things.”
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“It seemed very suitable for Reacher. His default position is analogue, and so he’s not going to be thinking in terms of IP this and gigabyte that. His natural outlook, and all those years of experience as an investigator before this technology came along, mean the idea of something being physically stolen is much more likely to occur to him than any of these technological things.”
Lee was equally interested in the physical demands of supposedly virtual technology. “It fascinates me about AI because it’s all sort of virtual, it’s all software, but it has the most immense physical requirements. These massive data centers. Water, power, acreage — it’s an immensely physical thing, not just virtual,” he explained. Rather than becoming a cybersecurity expert, Reacher solves the mystery by trusting his experience and observing what others have missed.
What Happens to Hennessy, Brill, and Cameron in ‘Chain Reaction’?
The conspiracy reaches its violent conclusion when Hennessy and his men confront Reacher, Turner, and Dexter Elwood in Summertown. Hennessy is killed, leaving Brill and Cameron without their protection. Reacher forces Cameron to transfer $10 million to Julia Bisley and her daughter Amanda, compensating the family of the murdered investigator. Turner then kills Brill and Cameron, bringing their operation to an end. Andrew explained why Reacher’s methods aren’t always particularly fair.
“I’d say that he fights for honor, but he doesn’t fight with any honor whatsoever. I think there was a line in this book where somebody was talking about an unfair advantage, and Reacher says basically, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as an unfair advantage. You win or you lose. You use everything at your disposal.’ That absolutely reflects him. He will absolutely fight dirty, but he’s fighting the bad guys for the right reason.”
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“I’d say that he fights for honor, but he doesn’t fight with any honor whatsoever. I think there was a line in this book where somebody was talking about an unfair advantage, and Reacher says basically, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as an unfair advantage. You win or you lose. You use everything at your disposal.’ That absolutely reflects him. He will absolutely fight dirty, but he’s fighting the bad guys for the right reason.”
What Does Reacher’s Final Question to the AI Mean?
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In one of the novel’s final moments, Reacher tests EEF’s artificial intelligence by asking it an obscure historical question about Mount Tambora. The system answers correctly, but when he asks it his own name, it fails. It’s a great moment because it shows how Reacher can still use his brainpower to defeat something that should have infinite knowledge, and in doing so, Andrew compared Reacher’s intelligence to two famous fictional detectives. He told Collider:
“He’s part Batman and kind of part Sherlock Holmes, because he has to make those deductive leaps that normally people aren’t going to make. What we hear constantly is that the readers love to think along with Reacher. They like to be presented with this puzzle that seems impenetrable at the beginning, and then they want to see Reacher working his way through step by step by step.”
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“He’s part Batman and kind of part Sherlock Holmes, because he has to make those deductive leaps that normally people aren’t going to make. What we hear constantly is that the readers love to think along with Reacher. They like to be presented with this puzzle that seems impenetrable at the beginning, and then they want to see Reacher working his way through step by step by step.”
Lee agreed that Reacher’s intelligence is just as important as his physical abilities, saying, “I think mental processes are actually more, or possibly just as much as, his physical power. That goes all the way back to Sherlock Holmes.” Lee went on to say, “If you return to the original Conan Doyle texts, Sherlock Holmes is obviously a tremendous thinker, but also very, very physical. Sherlock Holmes in the books is a fighter. He’s a street fighter. He knows what to do. And so Reacher is a kind of updated version of that. Both sides of the coin.”
Do Jack Reacher and Susan Turner End Up Together?
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Despite their reunion, Reacher and Turner don’t end the novel together, and their final goodbye is affectionate but bittersweet, with Turner telling Reacher she wants to know he’s still out there somewhere. There’s the reassurance that he’ll always be there, somewhere, though. And that’s how Reacher should be. A leopard can’t change its spots, as Andrew explained:
“From day one, we’ve been adamant that no, we’re not going to change Reacher. Reacher is going to be the same. What we will do is show Reacher from different angles, and we’ll put him in different environments which show a different aspect of his character. But we’re not changing his character.”
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“From day one, we’ve been adamant that no, we’re not going to change Reacher. Reacher is going to be the same. What we will do is show Reacher from different angles, and we’ll put him in different environments which show a different aspect of his character. But we’re not changing his character.”
It’s a fitting conclusion for a character who has confronted artificial intelligence, exposed a criminal conspiracy, and reunited with somebody he genuinely cares about, only to return to the road once again.
Chain Reaction is available now. Lee Child was speaking exclusively to Collider in support of Chain Reaction, the latest Jack Reacher novel. Child will also co-write Zero Margin, the first Frances Neagley novel, with Yasmin Angoe, arriving in spring 2027. Explore the Reacher novels and more with a free trial of Audible.
When retired Military Police Officer Jack Reacher is arrested for a murder he did not commit, he finds himself in the middle of a deadly conspiracy full of dirty cops, shady businessmen and scheming politicians. With nothing but his wits, he must figure out what is happening in Margrave, Georgia. The first season of Reacher is based on the international bestseller The Killing Floor by Lee Child.
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