Another crackling caper for the solitary Orphan X.
A maverick assassin squares off against a ruthless AI magnate and a mercenary doppelgänger.
Franchise fans will be pleased to learn that The Last Orphan (2023) wasn’t. “Nowhere Man” Evan Smoak, aka Orphan X, is back for his ninth taut thriller. He comes to consciousness, bloody and broken and barely alive, in a remote part of Texas outside the range of the RoamZone tracker that monitors him. While Evan reestablishes contact with teenage sidekick/protégé Joey and undertakes the goofy but heart-tugging challenge of finding his niece Sofia’s missing dog, Loco, efficient assassin Karissa Lopatina is hard at work, drowning software engineering manager Anwuli Okonkwo in her bathtub, then killing AI expert Dr. Benjamin Hill, whose path happens to have crossed Loco’s. She’s still on the scene when Evan arrives (what are the odds?). Their showdown takes a tragic turn when Hill’s teenage daughter tries to intervene, allowing Karissa to get away and leaving Evan to deal with the police. His narrow escape, combining guile and muscle, is vintage Hurwitz, set forth with gritty edge and puckish humor in short, punchy chapters that include several similar nail-biting scenes. Loco remains at large as Evan’s twisty path takes him to a creepy megalomaniac ironically named Allman and eventually to a face-to-face with Karissa, who, gender aside, could be his identical twin. A handful of characters from previous Orphan X capers return, including Tanner and Devine, who make cameo appearances. Crisp character delineation and a propulsive, forward-moving plot should keep new readers engaged.
Another crackling caper for the solitary Orphan X.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781250871732
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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