The Midnight Line (Jack Reacher, #22)

by Lee Child

‘Rose Sanderson got hit in the face by five pieces of shrapnel from an improvised explosive device concealed at the side of a road outside a small town in Afghanistan. The shrapnel appeared to be mostly small fragments of metal, probably off-cuts from a village-style engineering shop. The five pieces that hit her peeled her face off in chunks, and what stayed on was then badly abraded by smaller particles in the blast. But these days battlefield medicine is a miracle. They found most of the missing parts in her helmet and they sewed her back together again. Big name plastic surgeons, the whole nine yards.’ ‘But?’ Reacher said. ‘Two main problems,’ Bramall said. ‘I mean, OK, this was amazing work, no question. This was a definite KIA in Vietnam, and probably any other time in history, until the last few years. It was a virtuoso performance by the doctors. But great as it was, it was actually pretty lousy. It just can’t be done. She was left with scars like a jigsaw puzzle. Nothing fits right. Nothing works right. She looks like a horror movie. And that’s the good news.’ ‘What’s the bad news?’ ‘The concealed explosive device was concealed in a dead dog. That’s something they do out there. This one was maybe four days old. Getting ripe. The weather was hot. The blast drove rotting tissue and necrotic pathogens and all kinds of bad bacteria deep under the skin of her head. This all was four years ago, and she still can’t get rid of the infection. She leaks pus. She looks like ...

Great prose. Taut.