Prime Video’s “Reacher” has returned.

And, just as you’d expect, he’s righting wrongs, exposing corruption and killing a lot of thugs pretty indiscriminately. This is the Reacher way. And, quite frankly, Alan Ritchson’s version of the character, taking over from Tom Cruise (who portrayed Reacher in two major motion pictures in 2012 and 2016), is so evocative and fully formed that you can be forgiven for forgetting that the character actually has literary roots.

British author Lee Child, the pen name of Jim Grant, first created the character in 1997 with the novel “Killing Floor,” which was adapted into the first season of the Prime Video series. Every year since then, at least one Reacher novel has been published; in 2010, two novels with interconnecting stories were published. (They would make a great two-season arc.) Beginning in 2020, Child started collaborating on the novels with his younger brother Andrew.

But all...