Book review: Antihero by Gregg Hurwitz

Antihero by Gregg Hurwitz is the 11th in the series featuring Orphan X aka Nowhere Man aka Evan Smoak, and this is one of my favourite series. Here Hurwitz flexes all of his usual high-tech armoury bells and whistles but in the background Evan is continuing to morph from the cold assassin preferring his own company, to someone who can no longer hide that he’s come to care for those in his life. In this outing Evan is called-upon by a quite-mad and eccentric tech wiz (we first met in book #8 The Last Orphan) to locate a girl he’s never met but believes to have been kidnapped.

About this book

Two problems:
A tech-billionaire whose psychological crisis could have catastrophic implications for the global order. And the abduction of vulnerable young woman, Anca, seized from the New York City Subway, held, hurt, then discarded like trash.

One solution:
Evan Smoak, a former black ops assassin codenamed Orphan X, now dedicated to helping the desperate with nowhere else to turn.

But saving the world from a powerful man who has lost his mind while pursuing justice for an innocent survivor will test Evan like never before. Especially when complicated by Anca's inconvenient insistence that he show some measure of mercy to the men who abducted her.

Because if the world's greatest assassin cannot kill, then this mission just got a whole lot more daunting and dangerous.

My thoughts

Luke Devine is coming down (or flying high) from a concoction of drugs and hosting a visit from a prostitute when the woman breaks down and tells him she’d just seen another woman attacked and did nothing to help. Readers have already met Anca, getting to know a bit about her and her background before she’s surrounded by a group of men on the subway. We’re also with her in the aftermath which is horrendous and felt like it strayed a little from Hurwitz’s usual theme or tone. And not necessarily in a bad way. [The motivation behind Anca’s capture] just felt darker and more sinister than the usual weapon-wielding psychopathic baddies we meet in this series.

As well as Devine, who’s comically OTT here, we again meet Aragon Urrea (a cartel-type businessman) who is so indebted to Evan he offers up his private planes as necessary. And here, Evan finds himself confiding in Urrea about his relationship with Joey (17-year old Orphan program dropout) who’s somewhere between a niece and ward but who’s itching to become Evan’s apprentice.

He didn’t have the words to explain any of this to himself, let alone to Joey. Rage and fear, guilt and vigilance, the strange responsibilities he had to her at various levels, responsibilities that crashed into one another with exquisite confusion. He hadn’t learned to name complexities of emotion like this, to shape them and push them out of himself in a manner discernible to others. It was the opposite of everything he’d been built to be. And no matter how hard he struggled to learn this different language, it eluded him. p 276

There’s potentially less ‘action’ and weaponry here and more investigating which I enjoyed and I do love Joey so appreciate when her mad hacking skills play a major role. Hurwitz throws in a couple of other ‘Nowhere Man’ outings here though Evan stumbles across the first one as this book opens and my only beef with this is that particular plot element felt unnecessary and it didn’t really go anywhere… unless of course the MS13 gang or the young man he saves from them reappear in a future book. It did however give us some of the detailed and realistic action sequences Hurwitz proffers so effortlessly.

Early in this series it seemed prosecutor and neighbour Mia was to be Evan’s love interest, however Candy (Orphan V) reappears here along with Secret Service Agent Naomi Templeton, so Evan’s kinda awash with opportunities.

Antihero by Gregg Hurwitz was published in Australia by Penguin Books.

I received a copy of my book from the publisher for review purposes.