Spotlighting Frances Neagley's investigative prowess, the newest addition to the Reacher universe brings new cases that hit closer to home. After dropping in to save Major Jack Reacher a couple of times during his misadventures, Frances ventures out on her own in Prime Video’s spin-off show as she deals with a personal loss that comes with its fair share of mysteries.
It all begins in Chicago at 2 a.m. when a young man strips in the middle of the night and willingly jumps in front of a train. He says it’s ‘beautiful’ when the lights from the train blind him, and he’s eventually run over. Meanwhile, away from the accident site, Frances Neagley drives in the dead of night, following instructions from a voice on the phone.
She’s asked to park her car and told to ring a bell in a can a few blocks from the lot. When they hear the bell ring, the kidnappers try to take ransom money from her car, but they are stopped by none other than Mr. Reacher! It’s a walk in the park for Reacher to take down the men and rescue the kidnapped little girl.
Neagley later takes Reacher to a Chicago Cubs game to thank him, and they end up talking about Neagley’s father, who isn’t doing that well at the moment. She briefly talks about giving everything up and moving on to a ranch with Reacher before calling it a joke and parting ways with him.
Neagley works as a private investigator at a firm run by a man named Gerry York, a second-grade detective from New York City. He gives Neagley an earful for involving Reacher, who isn’t even a real PI, and for jeopardizing the case and risking the firm’s reputation. He calls her out for always bringing in trouble despite running her own department. As she walks away from her fuming boss, Neagley receives a phone call that changes everything.
Neagley suffers a personal loss
The call Neagley received was from Mr. and Mrs. Crane, parents of her childhood friend Tommy Crane, the same guy who killed himself on the subway. It turns out that Neagley shared a close relationship with Tommy, and they were mostly in touch even during her military days.
When Frances arrives at the Crane residence, she learns that Tommy’s death may not be a suicide after all. Preliminary reports did suggest that Tommy was high and ended up on the tracks, but his parents think that it was because of the cult or ‘community’ he joined. His father complained that they rarely saw him after he went to Echo Canyon, and he only wrote letters as if he were afraid of being spied on.
Neagley learns that the last letter he wrote mentioned her name. Tommy wrote that he was enjoying Echo Canyon as much as he loved going to a summer camp he and Neagley once attended. He specifically mentions that Neagley doesn’t worry about him, which sets off alarm bells for her.
Neagley mentions Tommy’s death and a letter to her father arguing about why he would say he enjoyed going to a camp, which he hated. Also, they hadn’t talked for years, so why would he all of a sudden tell her specifically not to worry about him? Her father warns her not to go looking for trouble when it’s not there, since it's second nature to a detective to dig up a cause when there isn’t one.
However, Neagley isn’t the one to let it go, and the very next day, she pops at the police station to dig up info about Tommy. She is set up with Detective Hudson Riley by an old associate of her father’s to assist Neagley with anything she needs for the case. Hudson shows Neagley camera footage in a five-mile radius around the accident, since all the cameras were non-operational on the L track that night.
Luckily, Neagley spots a guy running away from the scene of the crime at the exact moment the train hit Tommy. Hudson informs her that the boy is Keno, a regular at the police station for countless misdemeanors. Of course, it doesn’t take long for Neagley to track down Keno, who had himself wrapped up in trouble with the wrong people.
She ends up saving Keno and learns over breakfast that he’s a foster kid who just happened to be on the track when Tommy killed himself. He also mentions a mysterious truck that was parked near the subway, as it nearly drove over him, possibly trying to escape before the cops arrived. Keno points out that while he couldn’t properly see the truck, it looked like it was full of something green.
Later, when he takes Neagley to where he saw the truck, she picks up a buckwheat plant, which she finds Echo Canyon produces. Naturally, her next stop is the Echo Canyon farm, where she drives to under the pretense of collecting Tommy’s belongings as a family member.
Right off the bat, Neagley starts suspecting everything the moment Judith Gray, the operations manager, talks about Tommy as someone whom Neagley doesn’t recognize at all. Judith tells her that Tommy was off the grid most of the time and even slacked off at work. When she shows Neagley Tommy’s stuff, she’s surprised that he only had a toothbrush and a bunch of clothes for someone who was committed to the place and called it his new home.
Judith didn’t have much to offer to Neagley, but things take a drastic turn when she discovers that someone has been in her car. She calls out Judith, confidently stating her military rank and current position as a PI, since they must have broken into her car to run her VIN to gather information about her. Neagley makes it clear that she doesn’t trust what goes on the farm, and she’ll get to the bottom of Tommy’s death.
Echo Canyon tries to cover up Tommy’s death
Neagley immediately calls Hudson on the way to get a warrant for Echo Canyon, but he declines, saying they don’t have enough evidence to declare Tommy’s death a homicide. As she’s talking, another truck comes up to her fast and rams into her car. She informs Hudson of the situation, but before he can think of anything to help her, Neagley drives the truck off the road, and it crashes.
The man inside asks for help, but the truck blows up before Neagley can do anything. Police arrive shortly at the scene, and Hudson tells Neagley that anything worthwhile for the case was burnt, and they still don’t have anything for the warrant. She gives a drawing of a tattoo she saw on the man’s hand and asks Hudson to start with that.
She then gets a call from her office saying Yorker declined her request for the pro bono case (Tommy’s case). However, Neagley isn’t the least bit interested in what her boss thinks and asks Renee (the assistant) to find anything she can about anyone who would have the authority to shut down the cameras at the L. Renee hesitates, but she eventually agrees to help Neagley since that would mean she will be able to do actual PI stuff.
At the accident site, two suspicious men witness everything from a distance in their truck. They are later seen at the hospital, bribing the doctor to let them see the burnt body of the man who attacked Neagley. As expected, they take away his teeth — the only way to confirm the man’s identity.
As Neagley waits for new information to surface, she has a casual conversation with Hudson and finds that he belongs to a family with ties to a gang called Water Rats. Everyone calls him Rats because of his family’s criminal activities, so he became a detective to break away from that path.
On the other hand, Keno has crucial information for Neagley and has become her eyes and ears in the case. He informs her of two men who arrived at the hospital shortly after the body was brought in. They went, stuck around for about ten minutes, and then left.
Neagley and Hudson go to check the body and find that all of his teeth have been taken. However, Neagley has a trick up her sleeve as she extracts a voice-activated recording device from the body that she placed when it was being transported. They hear the men talking about a man called Lawrence, which Neagley identifies as Lawrence Cole. She tells Hudson that Cole owns the title to Echo Canyon and that they didn’t want the man identified because he was one of them.
They also learn from Keno that the tattoo on the man’s arm matches the sigil made when Echo Canyon’s pamphlet is folded a certain way. This proves that there’s more to Tommy’s death than meets the eye, especially when Judith told Neagley that he gave them a fake name and ID.
The scene intercuts to another featuring a businessman named Pierce Woodrow, who appeared earlier in a scene where he presented a drug called Tranqlara that he created to the board members of a company. According to him, the drug can alter the brain’s physiology to eradicate depression and anxiety.
In this particular scene, he’s standing in a gallery watching something on the screen that appears to be some kind of human experimentation for the drug. The doctor tells him that the drug didn’t work, and Pierce orders him to discard the vials and start again because they don’t have much time.
Meanwhile, Frances receives a call about her father being in the hospital. They share a heartfelt moment until Renee calls to inform them that she has found the man who got the cameras shut down at the L. They meet up to confront him but find him dead in his home. The gravity of the situation hits Neagley as she vows to get to the bottom of whatever or whoever is covering up Tommy’s death.
Neagley season 1 is now streaming on Prime Video.
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