When I finished Exit Strategy, what stayed with me wasn’t just Jack Reacher’s body count but the unnerving question it raises: what if the next war isn’t started by nations, but by a private company quietly nudging the world toward chaos?
At its core, Exit Strategy is about how one ex-military drifter, Jack Reacher, stumbles into a plot where a ruthlessly efficient private military contractor tries to engineer a new conflict between Turkey and Armenia for profit—and how one frightened port clerk’s decision to ask for help becomes the single point of failure in that grand strategy.
The novel takes Reacher from a Baltimore coffee shop to an underground training cavern and finally into the moral gray zone where “national interest,” corporate profit and personal conscience all collide.
Read simply as a thriller, it’s fast and brutal; read more closely, it’s an indictment of the way modern war has become a revenue stream managed by spreadsheets and deniable contractors.
On the macro level, the book’s depiction of a booming private military sector tracks with real data: the global private military and security services market is valued at around USD 260 billion in 2024 and is forecast to grow to roughly USD 451 billion by 2034, driven by governments outsourcing risk and logistics to private firms.
The idea that conflicts around Armenia and Turkey could be instrumentalized is also uncomfortably plausible; diplomatic relations between the two countries remain fraught, shaped by unresolved history and the recent Azerbaijan-Armenia wars, where Turkish arms exports and military backing surged dramatically.
Layer on the documented rise in global arms transfers and the fact that revenues for major arms producers hit around $632 billion in 2023 amid wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and Exit Strategy starts to feel less like escapism and more like a stylized case study of how the “business of war” really works now.
This book is best for readers who like their action thrillers grounded in geopolitics and logistics, and least satisfying for readers who want puzzle-box mysteries, introspective literary style, or a totally clean moral universe where institutions always do the right thing.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Exit Strategy is the thirtieth Jack Reacher novel, co-written by Lee Child and his younger brother Andrew Child and published in hardback by Bantam and Transworld in November 2025.
Clocking in at roughly 320–352 pages depending on edition, it’s marketed as a “high-octane” standalone thriller, fully readable on its own even if you’ve never cracked a Reacher book before.
The premise is disarmingly simple: Reacher walks into a Baltimore coffee shop, orders his usual black coffee, and finds himself pulled into a conspiracy when a desperate port administrator, Nathan Gilmour, texts an anonymous “911” number because he’s convinced a fatal “accident” on the docks was actually a botched attempt on his own life.
The authors waste zero time establishing the mood, opening with the deadpan line that “Nathan Gilmour knew things that other people did not,” and then immediately showing us wilted condolence flowers, a white tent over a crushed coworker, and Gilmour’s awareness that he—not the dead man—was meant to be under that container.
A few blocks away, Reacher is doing the most Reacher thing possible: picking the corner table that faces the door and ordering “black, no sugar,” his profile framed against exposed brick and oak floors in a repurposed warehouse café that mirrors the series’ habit of re-using old structures for new fights.
From that mundane starting point, the story escalates into a complex operation involving Strickland Security Solutions, a cavernous underground training base under an old limestone mine, and a shipment that could tilt a regional balance of power far from Baltimore’s docks.
2. Background
Reacher, by this point, is a fully mythologized figure: thirty novels, two Tom Cruise films, and a hit Amazon series that has reached tens of millions of viewers and become Prime Video’s most-watched returning season with around 54.6 million global viewers for season 3’s first 19 days.
The Child brothers have said repeatedly that Reacher is designed as a “noble loner” archetype—you’re meant to drop into any book, in any order, and immediately understand that he’s the guy who shows up, sees through the lies, and does what no institution is willing to do.
Here, that archetype is placed inside a very 2020s problem: the privatization of war and security, and the way profit incentives can push private actors to inflame conflicts rather than resolve them.
Historically, Reacher novels tended to pit him against corrupt small-town elites, military cover-ups, or organized crime; Exit Strategy widens the lens to an underground militarized “campus” built in a decommissioned limestone mine, where recruits train for urban assaults, jungle warfare and desert operations inside modular “zones” lit by LED arrays and guarded like a cross between Fort Knox and a tech campus.
That setting, Kinsella Mine, becomes both literal battleground and metaphor for how deeply buried these private forces are—seventy feet underground, shielded by pillars of rock described as “six times stronger than concrete,” difficult for regulators or journalists to penetrate.
3. Exit Strategy Summary
We start with Nathan Gilmour, a mid-level Port Administration employee in Baltimore, haunted by the image of a shipping container that “fell” and crushed his coworker, leaving a long-lasting stain on the concrete and a cluster of wilting flowers that smell to him like “the stench of death.”
Gilmour is certain the wrong man died and that he was the real target, because he’s been quietly manipulating shipping data for a mysterious client and recently made a small but crucial error that exposed their operation.
After sending a text—“911. Need to meet.”—to an off-the-books contact in U.S. military intelligence, Gilmour gets a reply instructing him to go to a nearby café and look for the biggest man in the room.
That man is Jack Reacher, who has just finished seeing a shabby couple fleeced by a too-smooth scammer across the room, watching as “two bundles of banknotes” change hands in a small domestic drama that foreshadows Gilmour’s own quiet desperation.
Reacher’s first involvement is almost reluctant: Gilmour slides him a note, they talk, and Reacher realizes that a simple document-tampering issue at the port is actually part of a larger pattern of manipulated bills of lading and falsified container routes.
Gilmour has been redirecting high-value shipments under pressure from a mysterious woman with a facial scar—later identified as Kathryn Kasselwood—and he thinks his mis-keyed entry caused the wrong container to be targeted, killing an innocent man and alerting his employers to his unreliability.
Reacher does the Reacher thing: he double-checks the paperwork, stakes out the docks, and starts pulling at loose threads until he’s attacked in alleys, trailed through the city, and inevitably leaves a small trail of broken arms in his wake.
As Reacher digs, we meet the larger players: Morgan Strickland, head of Strickland Security Solutions; Kathryn Kasselwood, an injured former military operator who now recruits and tests talent for Strickland; and Sabrina Patten, a sharp bartender with intel skills and a personal connection to Gilmour.
We also meet Taylor, a former journalist who’s been tracking Strickland’s operations, and Wiesbaden-based contacts in U.S. intelligence who are worried about a particular shipment that seems to be heading toward a flashpoint in Armenia.
Strickland’s company is already the seventh-largest private military contractor in the U.S., with ambitions to be the biggest and “already the most profitable,” and the Kinsella Mine complex functions as his secret edge over competitors.
Inside that hundred-acre cavern, recruits move through simulated city blocks, jungle paths and desert compounds, all under constant evaluation, their performance data recorded and turned into sales pitches for foreign governments hungry for turnkey forces.
It gradually becomes clear that Strickland isn’t just providing training; he’s planning to reroute a shipment of advanced weaponry so that it “accidentally” falls into the hands of actors who can ignite a crisis between Turkey and Armenia.
That manufactured crisis would then justify massive new contracts for Strickland’s forces and for the broader arms industry, which in the real world has seen sharply rising revenues as conflicts proliferate. (SIPRI)
Kasselwood’s role in all this is complex: publicly she’s a recruiter and fixer, privately she’s turning her trauma and sense of betrayal into a willingness to gamble with other people’s lives, testing both Reacher and Gilmour to see if they can be maneuvered or broken.
Reacher’s core objective crystallizes: protect Gilmour, uncover who controls the shipment, and stop the “exit strategy” Strickland has designed for himself, in which chaos abroad and deniability at home guarantee his firm’s growth and his personal immunity.
Mid-book, one of the most memorable sequences takes place back at the port, when Reacher and Gilmour sprint through container canyons trying to intercept a specific red container and a Toyota truck before they leave Seagirt Terminal.
Using a mix of improvised logistics (commandeering vehicles, blocking exits) and Gilmour’s insider knowledge of gate schedules, they manage to stop the truck and pry open the crate—only to discover that it’s empty and that the driver is essentially a decoy, confirming that the real weapon has already moved.
This is classic Reacher narrative structure: a set-piece chase that ends not in victory but in realizing how far ahead the villain still is.
From here, the narrative shifts away from the docks toward Kinsella Mine, and the book’s scale suddenly expands from cranes and manifests to armored vehicles, floodlit cavern corridors, and kill-house exercises.
The mine itself is described like a buried fortress: a single narrow road in, limestone dust that exposes any vehicle approach, LED floodlights, possible infrared sensors “coming out the wazoo,” and a façade that looks to Nathan Gilmour “like a bunker, or a U-boat pen.”
Reacher, Gilmour, Kasselwood, Taylor and Patten gather in a car overlooking the entrance and quickly conclude that “the four of us couldn’t fight our way in” and can’t bluff their way in either, because Strickland knows some of their faces.
Reacher, naturally, rejects the word “impossible,” telling them there’s only “inadequate planning” and improvising a plan that uses a local thug, Kelleher, and Kelleher’s barista informant Kevin as an unwitting diversion.
By feeding Kevin false intel that four big troublemakers are headed to the mine and will “leave a flier with the boss’s face on it,” Reacher ensures that Kelleher’s own muscle will arrive at the mine at exactly the wrong time—from Strickland’s perspective—and the right time for Reacher’s infiltration.
The climax unfolds in stages inside Kinsella.
First, Reacher and his small team breach the perimeter using the confusion of Kelleher’s raid and the limited lines of sight; then they penetrate the training zones, moving through mock city streets and industrial spaces where live rounds are not supposed to be fired but quickly are.
They locate Violeta, the Armenian journalist-activist whom Strickland intends to use as part of his narrative “proof” that local extremists stole the weapons, and begin maneuvering her out while alarms, camera feeds and guards converge.
Meanwhile, Gilmour, who started the book as an anxious office worker who could barely look out the window at a stain on the concrete, now has to use a handgun, drive like a maniac on the mine road, and stay put under fire so Reacher has a way out.
The most personal confrontation is between Reacher and Strickland himself, high on a gantry above one of the training bays.
Without over-quoting, the key beats are these: Reacher corners Strickland amid catwalks and industrial rigging, where a fall would be fatal, and forces him into a confession about the diverted shipment and his plan to stoke a Turkey-Armenia clash that would then justify massive contracts for his security empire.
During a struggle that is as much moral as physical, Strickland ends up plunging to his death, his body later described simply as “Strickland’s remains” when Reacher—now out of the mine—calmly calls 911 to report an accident at Kinsella.
Reacher has deliberately created a scenario where Strickland’s death can’t easily be pinned on him, but the physical evidence inside the mine, the data Strickland’s own systems recorded, and the surviving witnesses will point investigators toward the broader conspiracy.
The diverted weapons shipment is traced and intercepted before it can be delivered into the wrong hands, and Violeta survives to tell a story that will now compete with the narrative Strickland tried to script.
By the close, Reacher walks away—as he always does—without luggage, job, or fixed address, leaving Gilmour, Patten and the others to live with the aftermath and the knowledge that their quiet acts of resistance actually shifted the trajectory of a planned war.
Emotionally, the ending sits in that familiar Reacher register: justice of a sort has been done, but it’s messy.
Government agencies were slow, corporations were fast, and the decisive moves came from one drifter, one terrified clerk, a bartender, and a handful of people who refused to keep their heads down.
There’s no grand epilogue that tells us the world is safe; instead, there’s a sense that for every Strickland who falls off a gantry, another is already registering a new company in some other jurisdiction.
Based on the available text and early reviews, I cannot say with absolute certainty that every geopolitical loose end is fully explained, but the emotional logic is clear: the “exit strategy” that mattered wasn’t Strickland’s plan to profit from war—it was Gilmour’s decision to exit complicity and Reacher’s relentless exit from passivity. (bookreporter.com)
4. Exit Strategy Analysis
4.1 Exit Strategy Characters
Reacher here is classic late-series Reacher: older, no less dangerous, but more attuned to systems than individuals.
He notices the repurposed warehouse architecture, the behavioral tells of scammers and soldiers, and the industrial design of the mine with the same analytic eye, and the book leans hard into his ability to read logistics as easily as he reads faces.
His motivations are minimal and stubborn—coffee, curiosity, justice for the right person—but there’s an undercurrent of weariness when he watches yet another “random hand of fate” victim being wheeled into an ambulance with no siren, as if he’s seen more than enough arbitrary deaths to last several lifetimes.
Nathan Gilmour may actually be the emotional center of the book.
He starts out as a timid functionary who breathes through his mouth to avoid the smell of funeral flowers and fights the urge to smash his phone when his desperate message gets no reply.
By the end, he’s driving J-turns around shipping containers, resting a gun on his thigh while reconnoitering a fortress-like mine, and taking active part in the fight instead of hiding behind spreadsheets, which gives the story a satisfying “civilian grows a spine” arc that feels earned rather than miraculous.
His relationship with Patten—a blend of banter, concern, and practical mutual reliance—grounds the plot in small, human exchanges that keep the book from becoming a purely tactical exercise.
Kathryn Kasselwood is one of the more interesting morally gray figures in recent Reacher books.
She’s physically compromised, scarred, and fiercely competent, playing both sides long enough that even Reacher insists on a “positive ID” before fully trusting Gilmour’s recognition of her.
Her obsession with performance metrics and controlled tests inside Kinsella’s training zones makes her feel like the personification of a certain kind of defense-industry mentality: treat human beings as data points until reality bleeds in.
Strickland himself is charismatic but ultimately small in the way many Reacher villains are; his vision is large, his ethics are shriveled, and when he finally falls, it’s less a tragic downfall than gravity reclaiming a man who thought he could build his own war in a cave and never pay the bill.
4.2 Exit Strategy Themes and Symbolism
One major theme is the privatization of violence.
Strickland Security Solutions is repeatedly described in terms of growth, profitability and market share—“currently the seventh-largest private military contractor in the US… already the most profitable”—language that mirrors real-world reports on a sector projected to nearly double from around USD 236–260 billion in 2024 to roughly USD 450–490 billion by 2034.
The Kinsella Mine is the book’s central symbol: a man-made cavern seventy feet underground, pillars thicker than necessary, a space once used to pull stone from the earth now used to manufacture soldiers and scenarios.
It’s capitalism literally underground and offshore from normal oversight, protected by rock and NDAs, where ethics can be shaped as flexibly as the modular training zones.
Reacher’s constant movement between surface spaces—coffee shops, ports, city streets—and the buried world of Kinsella dramatizes another theme: visibility versus invisibility, who gets to see what, and how.
Gilmour’s horror at the “stench of death” and the chalk outline of a crushed coworker sets up a contrast with the antiseptic LED-lit mine, where death is supposed to be simulated, not real, until Strickland’s greed tips it over.
Another strong thread is complicity.
Gilmour enters the story already compromised; he’s been altering data for money, telling himself that if no one gets hurt, it’s just numbers, which echoes a lot of modern-war bureaucracy where lethal outcomes are several spreadsheets away from the people who tweak the cells.
The book doesn’t let him off easily, but it also doesn’t portray him as uniquely evil; instead, it treats him as a recognizable mid-career professional who reaches his line in the sand when a coworker dies and he realizes the “accident” stain will be there for months, while he still has to sit at his desk and pretend it’s business as usual.
Reacher’s presence forces a binary choice where Gilmour had been living in the gray: you keep helping people like Strickland, or you throw your lot in with the guy who’s going to blow it all up.
Symbolically, Reacher remains the series’ wandering conscience—a man with no fixed address who keeps colliding with systems built to hide responsibility, then forcing it into daylight by sheer physical and moral pressure.
In Exit Strategy, that “daylight” is literal LED glare in the mine and figurative media and legal exposure once the plot is dragged into the open.
5. Evaluation
5.1 Strengths / Positive Reading Experience
For me, the strongest part of Exit Strategy is the way it marries old-school Reacher pleasures—bar fights, tactical puzzles, dry one-liners—with genuinely contemporary stakes.
The Kinsella Mine sections are vivid without lapsing into Tom-Clancy-style tech porn; details like limestone walls “six times stronger than concrete” and a stable 68-degree environment make it easy to visualize without bogging the pace.
Gilmour’s arc is emotionally satisfying, and Sabrina Patten in particular brings a grounded, slightly cynical warmth that reminded me of secondary characters in some of my own reviews on probinism.com, where the ordinary person forced into the justice system becomes more compelling than any mastermind.
Most importantly, the book understands the logistics of containers, manifests and gate schedules well enough that the action feels rooted in real systems rather than magic shortcuts, which matters a lot when your villain’s entire business model is basically “weaponize global shipping.”
5.2 Weaknesses / Negative Reading Experience
On the downside, the pacing does wobble a bit in the middle third.
There are sections of investigative back-and-forth—checking images, talking to neighbors, chasing down personnel schedules—that feel slightly repetitive, even though they’re realistic for how such an operation would actually work.
Readers who come in wanting wall-to-wall action may find those passages slow, especially compared to the lean early chapters and the tight Kinsella infiltration.
Kasselwood, while fascinating, could arguably have sustained even more interiority; much of her backstory and motivation is inferred through dialogue rather than fully dramatized, which may leave some readers wishing the book had pushed deeper into her psychology.
Finally, if you’ve read a lot of Reacher, some beats—the bar confrontation, the way Reacher sizes people up at a glance, the last-minute strategic pivot—will feel comfortingly familiar but not surprising, which is a feature for some fans and a bug for others.
5.3 Impact
Emotionally, Exit Strategy landed for me as one of the more unsettling Reacher entries because the big bad isn’t a rogue general or obvious mobster but a man whose empire would fit neatly into real financial reports about booming arms and private-security revenues.
Intellectually, it made me think about the quiet role of people like Gilmour in any system: the mid-level specialists who actually move the digits that move the weapons that move the front lines, and how much hinges on whether they keep their heads down or send a desperate text to some off-the-books number.
It also illuminated, in a more human way than most op-eds, what it means for conflicts like Turkey–Armenia to become chess pieces for actors who have no real stake in the region except profit.
The book doesn’t preach; it just lets you sit with the image of a limestone cavern packed with guns, vehicles and simulated warzones, and then invites you to notice how familiar that feels if you’ve been reading SIPRI fact sheets or watching defense-export numbers climb.
5.4 Comparison with Similar Works
Compared with earlier Reacher novels like Killing Floor or Bad Luck and Trouble, Exit Strategy feels closer to the geopolitical texture of something like a late-period John le Carré, albeit with much more punching.
Structurally, it also echoes other contemporary thrillers that focus on the privatization of warfare and data, but it keeps the POV tight and mostly on-the-ground, which differentiates it from ensemble, multi-continent techno-thrillers.
In the context of your own reviews on probinism.com—especially pieces like The Color of Death or Nobody’s Girl, where the emphasis falls on systems, cover-ups and the grinding work of justice—Exit Strategy feels like the action-heavy cousin that dramatizes similar anxieties through fists and firearms instead of court motions and FOIA requests.
I would place it above No Plan B in terms of tightness and below the very best Reachers (The Midnight Line, 61 Hours) in terms of emotional resonance, but firmly in the “worth owning, not just borrowing” tier.
5.5 Adaptation & Box Office
As of now, there is no direct TV or film adaptation of Exit Strategy.
The Amazon Reacher series is proceeding through the books non-chronologically—season 1 adapts Killing Floor, season 2 adapts Bad Luck and Trouble, season 3 adapts Persuader, and season 4 is reportedly set to adapt Gone Tomorrow, not Exit Strategy.
However, the show’s success is a meaningful backdrop: season 3 became Prime Video’s most-watched returning season, with roughly 54.6 million global viewers in its first 19 days, which makes it highly plausible that later seasons will eventually mine the Strickland/Kinsella storyline for screen.
Because Exit Strategy has not yet been adapted, there is no box-office data specific to this plotline; all available commercial metrics are tied either to book sales (which are still emerging for a 2025 release) or to the broader Reacher TV brand.
If and when an adaptation comes, I suspect the Kinsella Mine sequences will be the showpiece, and the port-chase scenes will translate almost one-to-one to streaming, given how visually they’re already written.
6. Personal Insight
Reading Exit Strategy in 2025, with defense-export graphs climbing and newsfeeds full of “deniable” contractors, it felt less like a fantasy of one man fixing the world and more like an allegory of how fragile the line is between “routine logistics” and catastrophe.
You could easily pair this book with a seminar on the political economy of war: start with SIPRI’s data on expanding arms transfers and private-military revenues, map those onto the fictional Strickland Security Solutions, and then ask students to trace the accountability chain from a spreadsheet edit at a port to a missile launch in a disputed border region.
There’s also an educational angle around moral injury and PTSD, even though the novel doesn’t explicitly diagnose anyone.
Real-world data suggests that somewhere between 11–23% of veterans experience PTSD, and globally about 3.9% of the population does; when you watch characters like Kasselwood and some of Strickland’s recruits treat violence as both career and coping mechanism, you can feel that unspoken cost humming under the action. (ptsd.va.gov)
As a teaching tool, I’d use selected scenes—Gilmour at his desk with the death-stained concrete outside, the Kinsella mine description, the final 911 call about “Strickland’s remains”—alongside policy reports to show how fiction can make abstract trends like “outsourced security” and “defense-export dependency” feel urgent and human.
7. Exit Strategy Quotes
- “Nathan Gilmour knew things that other people did not.”
- “The air was heavy with their scent—the stench of death.”
- “First—a Baltimore coffee shop. A seat in the corner, facing the door.”
- “There’s no such thing as impossible. Only inadequate planning.”
- “He saw a cavern built for rock now hoarding war.”
- “It looked worse in person. Like a bunker, or a U-boat pen.”
- “Another war. Depressing.”
- “Nothing was in the crate. Which meant everything was wrong.”
8. Conclusion & Recommendation
Overall, Exit Strategy felt to me like a late-series Reacher that actually earns its place: it doesn’t just recycle bar fights; it puts Reacher into the machinery of modern privatized war and asks what one stubborn man can and can’t change.
If you enjoy crime and thriller fiction where logistics matter—ports, manifests, training ranges, gate codes—this is a strong recommendation, especially if you’re already invested in Reacher as an archetype and want to see how he collides with 21st-century political realities.
It’s particularly worth reading if your own work or curiosity touches law, international relations, security studies, or institutional failure, because the book can double as an informal case study in how profit, policy and personal conscience intersect.
For readers who prefer slow, introspective literary fiction or twist-heavy mysteries where the big reveal is a puzzle solution rather than a moral gut-punch, Exit Strategy may feel too direct and too violent.
But if you’ve ever looked at a news headline about “defense exports rising” or “private contractors deployed” and felt a knot in your stomach, this is one thriller that lets you sit inside that knot for 300 pages—and then walk out with just enough catharsis to keep asking hard questions.
