A detective story about money printing

Question

I probably read this 3-5 years ago. It is a story about a man that wants to reveal a money printing factory, which he does because his brother died (I guess) while trying to reveal that money printing.

I do not remember the details, but what I do remember is that the book mentions a Bulldozer shotgun, a Desert Eagle pistol, a police station, and a Bentley car.

I'm not sure but I think there is an event where he drove the Bentley through a police station. He shot 2 people dead, took their car, put their bodies with the baggage, and left the car in the airport.

His mission ended when the factory blew up. Also he had a romantic experience with a girl.

Most important, he knows that the factory buys 1 dollar money, and they wash it in the factory, and he knows they do that because the factory produces lots of waste (something like chlorine I guess), then the factory reprints the 1 dollar money.

He also gets into some serious fight in a home, where somebody pushes him into a swimming pool and his notes got wet, and he tried to dry them using a microwave, but they went blurry. Also at that home, he read a book that revealed many money printing, and a similar method had already been used, but in a different country. Also that home is a home of a banker that supplies the 1 dollar money.

Maybe it is not in chronological order, but I tried my best to reconstruct the story.

Answer 1

This is Lee Child's Killing Floor, the first published Jack Reacher book.

Jack Reacher gets off a Greyhound bus in the town of Margrave, Georgia, because he remembers his brother mentioning that a blues musician named Blind Blake had died there. Much to his surprise, shortly after his arrival, he is arrested in a local diner for murder on the orders of the sheriff, Morrison, who falsely claims he saw Reacher leave the scene.

While in custody, Reacher meets Finlay, the chief of detectives, and Roscoe, a female officer who believes him to be innocent. Reacher persuades Finlay to call a number on a piece of paper found in the dead man's shoe; the number leads them to Paul Hubble, a retired banker who instantly confesses to the murder. Before Reacher can be released, he and Hubble are transferred to a state prison in Warburton, where Reacher manages to thwart an attempt on their lives by the Aryan Brotherhood. Suspecting that the deputy warden set them up, Reacher joins Finlay's investigation, while Hubble is presumed dead after vanishing from his house in the middle of the day.

Reacher learns that the murdered man is his brother, Joe, who was running an investigation into a counterfeiting ring operated by the Kliner family under the protection of Morrison, several dirty cops, and the corrupt mayor, Grover Teale. A second body, belonging to truck driver Sherman Stoller, is found, and Morrison and his wife are brutally murdered shortly thereafter. Roscoe theorizes that the Kliners are using Margrave as a distribution hub for their counterfeit money, but this is eventually disproven when Reacher searches one of their trucks and finds it empty. He then realizes that the opposite is true: the Kliners have been hoarding the money in response to a Coast Guard operation cutting off their supply of bills from Venezuela, and plan to resume distribution once the operation is shut down as a cost-saving measure.

Sending Hubble's family into hiding to protect them from Kliner, Reacher kills his son and several other associates after luring them into an ambush. He then informs Finlay of the secret behind Kliner's operation, which his brother had been trying to prove: to obtain the special paper required to make undetectable forgeries, the criminals had employed Hubble to collect hundreds of thousands of used $1 bills and send them to ports in Florida through Stoller and other drivers, whereupon they would be bleached in Venezuela to remove the ink and then used to make forged $100 bills. However, when they return to Margrave, they are taken captive by Kliner, Teale, and Finlay's FBI contact Picard, who reveals that he's been keeping track of their progress, and has Roscoe and Hubble's family in his custody. Kliner reveals that Hubble isn't dead, but in hiding, and threatens to kill his hostages unless Reacher finds him.

En route, Reacher stages a distraction and kills Picard's escorts, before apparently shooting him dead. He then locates Hubble in a nearby motel, and brings him back to Margrave. Finding the criminals gone, they spring Finlay from captivity in the police station and set it on fire, before locating the hostages at Kliner's warehouse. Reacher kills a dirty cop named Baker, shoots Teale and Kliner, and sets fire to the rest of their money. A wounded Picard shows up and beats Reacher down, but Finlay distracts him long enough for Reacher to kill him. The group then escapes as the warehouse explodes, and Reacher ends up spending the night with Roscoe. Realizing that his actions will attract a lot of unwanted attention from the authorities, Reacher decides to leave Georgia. Roscoe gives him one last gift: a picture of his brother retrieved from one of Kliner's victims.

The scene where Reacher is tackled into the swimming pool sounded familiar, so I did a quick search, finding the other details matched. As much as anything, the factory blowing up is kind of a Reacher trademark in that he's more of a force of righteous destruction than a detective (something I remember having a great deal of "Fridge Horror" to me in one book where he blows up a facility processing radioactive metal... so much for living within a few hundred miles of that spot).