A few years ago, teaching a class on the open road, I asked my students to read Echo Burning, the fifth of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, published in 2001. Wandering a borderlands landscape populated by strong, dangerous, rapacious men—the sort of men one finds in the work of Cormac McCarthy or William Faulkner—Reacher is picked up while hitch-hiking by a beautiful Mexican émigré, who has been abused by her vile husband. The husband, in turn, is surrounded by a gang of criminals, each of them deserving extra-legal punishment. Reacher, after hearing the woman’s story, goes undercover as a day laborer and ranch hand, and, as the saying goes, hijinks ensue. By the end of the novel, the Texas countryside is painted red with blood, the entire legal establishment has been revealed as ineffective, and Reacher has administered his punishment. Then, as always, he moves on.

I’d asked my students what they thought of Reacher, and they suggested that he should stand trial for murder. Then, reading carefully through his interior monologues, they decided that he was insane and had him remitted to a high-security mental health facility. In our summary discussion, we talked a lot about Reacher as post-Cold War John Rambo, the Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD who wanders into a small town in the Pacific Northwest and runs afoul of the local police. The point, for my students, was that Reacher should never have been set loose on the American countryside. Jack Reacher troubles me, too.

Lee Child’s new Jack Reacher novel is the twentieth in a series that dates back to the Clinton administration. Reacher is big business, of course. Last year’s installment, Personal, has sold 450,000 copies, and in 2012 Tom Cruise starred in an adaptation of one of the books. Classic pulp, the plotlines of each bestselling novel in the series feature lean arcs and little character development. Drawing from a handful of closely linked genres—police procedurals, mystery novels, mixing Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler—they contain much that is familiar and much that never changes. Formulaic literature, like serial drama, is popular precisely because it tells the same, comfortable story, with the same much-adored protagonists, over and over again. Indeed, one could lose a decade or two reading these novels and waiting for the moment somebody actually learns something new about themselves, and shifts direction or grows emotionally as a consequence. There is not a single existential moment in all twenty.

Fans will be thrilled, I’m sure, by the book’s title—Make Me—which accurately captures the protagonist’s distinctively gruff machismo. At six foot five inches, two hundred and fifty pounds of scarified military history, Reacher is an avatar of white masculinity in an age of radical transformations. The son of a military man, he is an armed forces brat who grew up abroad without any real experience of his homeland. Once a decorated military policeman and a scrupulous investigator, he is now a vagabond without a care in the world.

Maybe, deep down, we imagine that justice comes from lawlessness, and not from a judge, or a trio of lawyers, or a constitutional scholar.

Make Me delivers exactly what regular readers of the Reacher novels have come to expect. There is a mysterious disappearance, a strong and beautiful woman, and a vast criminal conspiracy. There is a single enigmatic clue, discovered on a crumpled up piece of paper. Skulls get cracked. People die. Law enforcement will fail do much of anything, which means that Reacher will have to bring the hammer himself. (Cops are either ineffective or absent in the Reacher books; in Make Me, they are practically invisible). Moving briskly and with little adornment, the book underlines and highlights what we already know: that Reacher is the blunt instrument of justice sent, it seems, by the universe, appearing out of nowhere, turning the world upside down, and the disappearing at the end into the mist.