Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher is novelist Lee Child’s hero to a T

Truth be told, first name Jack, last name Reacher, neither a middle name. He is a hero. He is ex-US military. He loves Greyhound buses. He travels light, a toothbrush, a slender roll of cash, a card. But more than anything else, he is a modern-day cowboy, ranging far and wide on American back roads, getting off in the middle of nowhere, on a whim. What does he hate most? Injustice. And what does he love most? Large cups of black hot coffee.

For a man who is a mountain, six feet five in his socks, he is remarkably light on his feet. All he wants is to see the world go by. But trouble seems to find him unerringly, as his mother used to say, when he was a little boy. He cannot watch a bully moving in on someone weaker. He wades in, makes it his fight, and wins. In a world increasingly drowning in uncertainties, Reacher is deeply reassuring. He is always the last man standing.

For fans of his exploits, and I’m one, the biggest downer of the two movie adaptations (Jack Reacher, 2012; Never Go Back, 2016) of best-selling author Lee Child’s work, was the fact of Tom Cruise playing Jack Reacher. How could a 5’7 man play a guy who is 6’5? The movies themselves weren’t ghastly, but really, what were they even thinking? Like a million others, I could never take Cruise’s Reacher seriously.

Jack Reacher in a still from the film

But the moment you set eyes on the Reacher of Amazon’s new show of the same name, you know that previous wrongs will be set to rights. Alan Ritchson’s Reacher is tall and broad, straw hair clipped short, eyes light blue: this is Lee Child’s Reacher to a T. The other thing which felt off-key about the Cruise films was that they were based on a couple of randomly chosen novels. This Reacher series starts, as it should, with the beginning. Killing Floor is the first Reacher novel (1997), and that’s the story, set in Margrave, Georgia, that we see unfurling over eight episodes of the show.

Someone in this Southern town full of sunshine and shadows, is involved in counterfeiting. A trail of bodies, done to death in grisly, terrifying ways circle around Reacher who happens to have wandered into town just because he is curious to know the origin story of a legendary Blues singer called Blind Blake. Chief detective of the Margrave police department Oscar Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin) is convinced that Reacher is lying. His only ally appears to be the feisty, attractive cop Roscoe Conklin (Willa Fitzgerald).

Those who remember Killing Floor will spot the differences that the show, created with the author’s active involvement (watch out for a flash in which he appears), builds in. No spoilers, but all I say is that they feel organic, giving us the backstory of one of the most popular, propulsive action heroes of our times. When Reacher hits ’em, they stay hit.