Lee Child’s Personal: spoiler alert

In Lee Child’s new novel Personal,  due in the shops here on Monday 1 September, there is a passage in Chapter 14 when Jack Reacher goes to Paris (Paris, France that is):

The green door had a small brass plaque next to it which said Pension Pelletier. A pension was a modest hotel, somewhere between a rooming house and a bed and breakfast. [. . .] 

I ordered an extensive breakfast, anchored by a large pot of coffee, accompanied by a croque madame, which was ham and cheese on toast with a fried egg on top, and two pains au chocolat, which were rectangular croissants with sticks of bitter chocolate in them.

Wonderful. I bet Lee Child didn’t include these explanatory details in the manuscript he delivered to the publisher. One of his editors would have requested them. I would love to know how that author-editor conversation went, and how the editor explained that the author could not expect his readers to know about these obscure French things. Like, dude, who has ever heard of pain au chocolat?

Otherwise, I can report from the half-way mark that Personal is a cracker, and another Lee Child masterclass in how to end a chapter.