Reacher Authors Reveal The Book That Was The Genesis Of Reacher - And What's Next For The Series

Published Oct 20, 2026, 4:32 PM EDT Rose Graceling-Moore is an author, poet, and content manager, who has been writing about film, TV and comics since 2013, when she began writing for a local print magazine in Vancouver, BC. Since then, Rose has written for Horror Honeys, Moviepilot and Quirkbooks as well as Screenrant, initially focusing on comics and television, as well as diversity and representation on screen. Rose also co-hosted the DC Movies Podcast, and has guested on other nerd and entertainment podcasts over the past ten years. Now, she leads the Books team, and her own debut novel, The Second Chance Summer, was released in 2026. Sign in to your ScreenRant account Alan Ritchson may not be returning to the small screen as Jack Reacher until 2027, but there is still one new Reacher release for 2026, with Chain Reaction, the 31st book in the long-running series, coming out today, October 20th. Chain Reaction (co-written by Lee and Andrew Child) takes Reacher to an isolated town, and brings back an old flame (Susan Turner) as Reacher digs in to a military conspiracy: Jack Reacher is hard to find. It's not easy to track him down. And he likes it that way. But General Susan Turner, based deep inside the Pentagon, has the means and the motive. She needs his help. A member of her team has been brutally murdered on covert duty. She can’t trust anyone she works with, not even her deputy. She needs someone from the outside. Someone who solves problems and disappears without a trace. Reacher heads to Summertown, Colorado. A town as remote and bizarre as it gets. One diner, one motel, five massive data centers, two giant solar farms humming away in the dust. Total population: four people. And one of them is watching him. But Reacher isn’t built to run. He’s built to finish things. General Turner knows that if they come for Reacher, they’ll regret it—all the way to the top of the chain. Ahead of the book release, Screen Rant sat down with Lee and Andrew Child to talk about the Prime Video adaptation, Chain Reaction, and how this unique action hero translates from page to screen. Purchase Chain Reaction here. How Reacher Changes The Book For The Show - And Why It Works So Well Image via MovieStillsDB ScreenRant: When you started, did you think you were going to get 31 books out of this? Lee Child: No. I mean, you've got to be crazy to think that. I remember hoping. I mean, to be honest with you, I was hoping the first book would be such a monster smash I'd never have to work again. But then I thought, let's keep it going. I wish I'd paid more attention at the beginning because it has turned into something huge and I dreamed of it, I hoped it, but of course, I didn't expect it because that would be delusional SR: Do you think that the show has the same potential? LC: I'm really happy with the way they're doing it. The title of the show is Reacher, and it's about Alan playing Reacher. The character carries all the weight, the actor carries all the weight. But also what they're doing is amazing secondary casting. Every [season] has been just really great from the small people at the top of the cast, the small group that inevitably develops right down to the waitresses in the diner. They really put a lot of effort into it, and I love that. You know, I love a job done properly. SR: Speaking of the rotating cast, we've got some major fan favorites that everyone always wants to know if they'll come back. Roscoe is one that everyone wants to see return - do you think that that's ever going to be possible? LC: I hope so. I mean, I thought she was sensational, and season one was just fabulous, beyond what I had imagined writing the book. That's the thing that I love about what they're doing, is that it's never less than I expected or less than I input. It's always more. And she was fantastic, and I would love to see her come back. I mean, all of them I would love to see come back. SR: And obviously there's some changes made to some of the characters as well. Tamara Greene versus Theresa Lee, for example. LC: That's something that you've got to absolutely expect because the end result, I think, is a very, very faithful adaptation of the stories. But the weird thing about transferring from the page to the screen is to get a faithful adaptation, you've got to change every single thing, basically. The Reacher books are so much inside Reacher's head and on the page, that works great. But you can't do that on television. You can't have Reacher sitting still for 10 minutes while he figures something out. So everything has to change in order to be the same. And [the creators] love the books. You know, they're doing the show because they're Reacher fans. They are more respectful of them than probably Andrew and I are. Why Die Trying Was Not Adapted- And What's Next For Season 5 SR: Speaking of how much the creators and Alan himself love the books, I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about Die Trying, because I know that Alan has mentioned that it's his favorite and that it was initially approved to be adapted until the results of the election. Can you talk at all about sort of what happened there? LC: Well, I wasn't privy to that conversation. I think that was written 29 years ago now, and the world was different, the political concerns were different. The idea that there were these weird militia groups out west that were trying to set up a separate nation and so on was strange back then, but now it's become more mainstream. And the idea that their overt mission was to have this white supremacist state out west now is very politically sensitive. So I guess we just didn't need the noise that would have surrounded it. From my point of view, I think all the books are great and therefore any one of them would do. Alan has his favorites, and he loves that one . Other people have different favorites. Next season is going to be Make Me Yes. Which was the showrunner's favorite. Nick Santora. He really wanted to do that book and I think it's going to be difficult to do because it's a horrible story. Very dark, incredibly dark. How they're going to do that, I don't know. I'm really anxious to see the screenplay and figure it out. SR: Do you have any say at all in which book is the next one being adapted or do you just wait to find out? LC: We always have a call. Like, it's a bit like when you go to a Chinese restaurant with a group of friends and you're going to share and so get this endless discussion about what you're going to order. It's kind of like that. And then one of them will emerge because somebody is that much more passionate about it. There's a huge menu, obviously, 31 books. So they'll do them all eventually, I'm sure. SR: How do you feel about whats different for the next season? It's very outside the more traditional criminal elements and goes into a very, very dark place. LC: It does. I mean, we'll see how dark they make it and we'll see whether they move the issue a little bit because it's basically about suicide. And that is very touching. We'll see what they do with it. But I'm confident that they'll come up with something good. And what I'm really happy about is that it is not urban. You know, we've had a couple that were. This last one set in Philly, the book was New York, but, you know, same kind of feel. It was all urban and Make Me is absolutely in the middle of nowhere. I mean, that's the whole point of it. You've got 10,000 square miles of nothing in this strange little town. So I'm glad that we're changing it up in that sense. To do one of the Badlands ones will be great. How Reacher Has Evolved From The First Book To Chain Reaction SR: How do you feel that Reacher is changing and evolving from the first book to Chain Reaction now? LC: Well, I mean, what I wanted Andrew to do when we started working together was to help Reacher move into at least the 20th century, if not the 21st, where it came to technology, which we all deal with all the time. And a lot of the time, Reacher was behind the curve on technology by a dramatic distance, which I think is okay, because the reader does not want to feel inferior to the characters in the book. If the reader knows a little bit more than the hero about technology, that's a good thing. But it ended up with Richard being grotesquely out of period in terms of what he understood. And so that was the one thing I asked Andrew to do was just to haul him forward a little bit. Andrew did a great job with that, with the Sentinel. And we always start with the villain somehow. We always. I mean, that's what animates us, basically. Who do we not like? What type of person irritates us? And we don't want it to be a James Bond villain in some underground lair with his finger on the nuclear button while simultaneously stroking a white pussycat. We don't want that villain. We want a kind of relatable person, the sort of person that you are annoyed at in your life. So we start with the villain. We kind of work backward. And I guess what was on our minds were these appalling tech bros. You know, quite apart from whatever damage they may do, they're just so yucky! Lee & Andrew Child's Book/Movie Recommendations Alistair MacLean - Ice Station Zebra LC: I think you'd have to go back to Alistair Maclean [for a recommendation in the same genre as Reacher], who is a long time ago now. But that is sort of the genesis of Reacher, because as widely apart in age as Andrew and I are, we both read Ice Station Zebra by Alistair Maclean, my dad's copy that was just on the bookshelf and I read it, and then probably 15 years later, Andrew read it and that had a big effect on us. So I think deep down, Alistair Maclean has got a lot to do with Reacher, inasmuch as he always invented a hero that was just so large, larger than life, but never quite cartoonish. He pushed him right to the edge, but never let him fall off. And that is, I guess, what we've always tried to do with Reacher. AC: I mean, he was absolutely pivotal to me in terms of making me just obsessed with the way that stories can be told. You know, I read Ice Station Zebra when I was really young, essentially as a challenge from a schoolteacher, and I was young enough that I didn't have any concept of the unreliable narrator, or the dishonest narrator, or it hadn't dawned on me that actually you can just completely tell lies in books. So it was that, that was really, really important to me. Linda Keir- I Did Not Kill My Husband AC: The book I've read recently that I really enjoyed is called I Did Not Kill My Husband. And I thought it was a really interesting book because it combines a number of things. At its heart, it's a thriller. A woman has been arrested for murdering her husband. At the beginning of the book, circumstances line up such that she's able to escape and go on the run. And you have to figure out, well, is this an indication that she is guilty because she's escaping justice, or is she doing it in order to prove her innocence? So classic thriller elements, great characters, but what they also do is they don't go out of their way to make everybody likable. The main character who you have to figure out whether she's innocent or not, she's not necessarily a nice person. You're not just automatically rooting for her. You're having to look at it in the way that you do in real life, where it's not just is somebody nice or not, it's what are the morals involved here? They bring in a lot of the kind of zeitgeist stuff that if we'd been having this conversation five, ten years ago, just wouldn't have even been relevant. Reacher Release Date February 3, 2022 Network Prime Video Cast Maria Sten Frances Neagley