A crackerjack thriller that briskly enhances the legend of Orphan X.
The iconoclastic Orphan X penetrates a Mexican cartel to rescue a South Texas beauty.
When his daughter, Anjelina, is snatched from her 18th birthday party, drug kingpin Aragón Urrea reaches out to assassin Evan Smoak, aka Orphan X. It’s pure luck that he’s able to reach the righteous, reclusive killer, who’s in seclusion after a harrowing free-fall escapade. Aragón’s heavily guarded compound clearly indicates that he’s no innocent, and the first tense meeting of the two powerful men simmers with the threat of violence, but stoic Evan has looked death squarely in the eyes many times before. The receipt of a cleanly decapitated head via FedEx—belonging not to Anjelina but to a man Aragón has undercover with the kidnappers—raises the stakes exponentially for the distraught Aragón, who assigns henchmen Kiki and Special Ed to assist Evan. Hurwitz gives his seventh Orphan X thriller an epic scope, writing with verve and color whether he’s relating the pre-coital banter between Evan and his neighbor Mia Hall, documenting the tangled search for Anjelina, or depicting her gritty fight for survival, to which he devotes a generous portion of the tale. His pace is leisurely but impactful, full of genre set pieces, fight scenes and chase scenes, and tense showdowns. Each member of the large cast of supporting series characters, developed over previous installments, gets a turn onstage. The deeper Evan goes, the more challenges he faces, including his considerable doubts about the propriety of helping a character as disreputable as Aragón. Deadly sparks fly when the Nowhere Man—that is, Orphan X—meets the novel's archvillain, the Dark Man.
A crackerjack thriller that briskly enhances the legend of Orphan X.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2502-5230-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.
The feds must protect an accused criminal and an orphaned girl.
Maybe you’ve met him before as protagonist of The 6:20 Man (2022): Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine, who’d had the dubious fortune to tangle with “the girl on the train,” is now assigned by his homeland security boss to protect Danny Glass, who's awaiting trial on multiple RICO charges in Washington state. Devine has what it takes: He “was a closer, snooper, fixer, investigator,” and, when necessary, a killer. These skills are on full display as the deaths of three key witnesses grind justice to a temporary halt. Glass has a 12-year-old niece, Betsy Odom, and each is the other’s only living relative—her parents recently died of an apparent drug overdose. The FBI has temporary guardianship of Betsy, who's a handful. She tells Travis that though she’s not yet 13, she's 28 in “life-shit years.” The financially well-heeled Glass wants to be her legal guardian with an eye to eventual adoption, but what are his real motives? And what happens to her if he's convicted? Meanwhile, Betsy insists that her parents never touched drugs, and she begs Travis to find out how they really died. This becomes part of a mission that oozes danger. The small town of Ricketts has a woman mayor who’s full of charm on the surface, but deeply corrupt and deadly when crossed. She may be linked to a subversive group called "12/24/65," as in 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan beast was born. Blood flows, bombs explode, and people perish, both good guys and not-so-good guys. Readers might ponder why in fiction as well as in life, it sometimes seems necessary for many to die so one may live. And what about the girl on the train? She's not necessary to the plot, but she's a fun addition as she pops in and out of the pages, occasionally leaving notes for Travis. Maybe she still wants him dead.
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757901
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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