The Terminal List
Jack Carr's The Terminal List, published in 2018, is the explosive debut that launched the bestselling James Reece thriller series and was adapted into the Amazon Prime Video series starring Chris Pratt. Lieutenant Commander James Reece is a Navy SEAL whose final combat deployment goes catastrophically wrong: an ambush on his platoon kills nearly every man under his command, and Reece himself is medevaced home for tests on what investigators are calling a tumor. Almost immediately the people closest to him start to die. His wife and young daughter are murdered in their California home. His SEAL teammates begin turning up as suicides. Reece, who has spent his career executing other people's targets, realizes that he is now one, and that whoever drew up the list against him reaches from defense contractors to senior officials in Washington. Drawing on Carr's own twenty years as a SEAL sniper and team leader, the novel pairs procedurally exact tradecraft, weapons handling, and counterintelligence with a slow-burning revenge plot that has more in common with Greek tragedy than airport thriller cliche. Readers who came up on Vince Flynn and Brad Thor will find a worthy successor in Reece, and a clear new voice in modern military fiction.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Terminal List
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Navy SEAL commander James Reece survives an ambush in Syria that kills the rest of his troop and arrives home a week later to bury his wife and daughter, dead in what California police are calling a murder-suicide. Reece is told he has a brain tumor, and writes a list of names from the Pentagon up.
Jack Carr has written more than seven Terminal List novels and continues the series. New volumes typically release annually.
Yes. Amazon Prime Video released The Terminal List starring Chris Pratt in 2022. A prequel series, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, focused on a different character was released in 2025.
The Terminal List was written by Jack Carr, published in 2018 by Atria Books.
The Terminal List is 464 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Terminal List takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
The Terminal List is a standalone novel by Jack Carr, not part of a series.
The Terminal List is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.