Cleaning the Gold. Karin Slaughter

      

       Copyright

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

      Copyright © Karin Slaughter and Lee Child 2019

      Excerpt from The Silent Wife © Karin Slaughter 2020

      Will Trent is a trademark of Karin Slaughter Publishing LLC.

      Lyrics from:

      “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” (written by Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio)

      Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

      Cover photographs © Luke Sharrett/Getty Images (background image of Fort Knox), Shutterstock.com (all other images)

      Karin Slaughter and Lee Child assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008358938

      Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008358945

      Version: 2020-08-03

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Dear Readers

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Keep Reading

       About the Authors

       Also by Karin Slaughter

       Also by Lee Child

       About the Publisher

      Dear Readers

      We’re so thrilled to finally be able to share a short story with you that has been several years in the making!

      We’ve been friends for nearly two decades now – and also fans of each other’s writing. Over the years, our conversations have often turned to the topic of what our series characters, Jack Reacher and Will Trent, would do if they met in real life. Would Will arrest Reacher for taking out some vigilante justice on a bad guy? Would Reacher break Will’s face or throw him down a well? The challenge was finding a way for them to work together. Both men have strong moral compasses, but they each reach true north in very different ways. Finding a case that would bring them into each other’s orbit was a very long conversation that finally resulted in a plot that we were both excited to work out on the page.

      The result is Cleaning the Gold. We started off writing our own chapters separately but as the stories became intertwined things merged, so you won’t necessarily know who wrote what – and we really hope you enjoy it. No matter what, we think Jack and Will had a pretty good time navigating the beginning of a beautiful friendship …

      Best wishes,

      Karin Slaughter and Lee Child