A homicide investigator digs deeper into a case involving a trained military sniper who shot five random victims. While unemployed and midway through writing the first novel with the character as yet unnamed, Lee Child visited his local supermarket with his wife. An elderly lady approached him and asked him to reach an item off a high shelf for her. His wife commented: "Hey if this writing thing doesn't work out, you can be a reacher in a supermarket." Reacher's demeanor is stoic, and he does not talk much. He has a propensity for saying "that's for damn sure". Reacher frequently does not answer when people make statements or ask questions, nodding or shrugging, preferring the other party to fill the silence. A recurring line in the novels is "Reacher said nothing". He is cool-headed and rarely becomes visibly angry, one of the few exceptions to this occurs in Nothing to Lose when he erupts in rage at an apathetic hospital employee for not ensuring that a comatose Iraq War veteran received the proper care. Sometimes during the course of a novel, usually toward the end, Reacher calmly kills his foe(s) even after they are no longer a threat, but only if they have committed terrible acts (usually multiple murders) which he feels merit their deaths as justice. Such killings by Reacher are featured in Persuader and Bad Luck and Trouble, among others. In 61 Hours, it is stated that an Army psychological study of reactions to fear in children showed him as having abnormally fast reflexes and aggression levels at the age of six. Reacher believes that this abnormal level of aggression at that age is due not to genetics (as the Army report suggested) but because he got tired of being frightened, and "trained [him]self out of it". He generally likes to be alone, and says that he has mild agoraphobia. He states that this condition is not, as commonly assumed, a fear of open spaces, but of crowds. In The Hard Way, Reacher is described as completely lacking "The remorse gene. It just wasn't there.
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