Narrator Scott Brick brings his usual gravitas to this audiobook, a riveting story featuring Evan Smoak, a highly trained agent charged with finding the kidnapped daughter of a drug kingpin. Brick is admirable with his voices. He gives Evan a controlled tone that fits his personality. Aragon, the drug lord who hires Evan, is given a soothing accented voice. A more vicious adversary takes on a gruff angry tone. As clearly different and engaging as the voices are, it’s Brick’s emotion that elevates this story. It shifts from a thriller as Evan infiltrates the opposition to a comedy as he deals with his 16-year-old assistant and to a love story as his girlfriend, Mia, brings him out of his shell. It all results in a great marriage of exciting plot and exceptional narration. M.B. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
★ 11/29/2021
In bestseller Hurwitz’s excellent seventh Orphan X novel (after 2021’s Prodigal Son), Aragón Urrea, a South Texas drug lord, approaches former black ops assassin Evan Smoak (aka the Nowhere Man), who assists people in seemingly hopeless situations as a way of paying penance for past sins. Urrea’s 18-year-old daughter, Anjelina, has been kidnapped by a ruthless Mexican cartel. Despite doubts about helping a criminal like Urrea, Smoak agrees to try to rescue Anjelina. Along the way to the satisfying resolution, Smoak is forced to scrutinize his own life, in which he has remained distant from those most important to him—in particular, love interest Mia Hall, a district attorney and single mother who’s faced with a life-threatening surgery, and Joey Morales, a 16-year-old hacker extraordinaire who has become a surrogate daughter of sorts. Nonstop action and relentless pacing are matched by deeply philosophical and powerfully emotional undertones. Unlike comparable series that tend to lose steam after several installments, this series just gets better as it evolves. 200,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Lisa Erbach Vance, Aaron Priest Literary. (Feb.)
"Awesome and propulsive." —New York Times
"Perfectly paced and beautifully structured... Thrillers don't get any better than this." —Providence Journal
"A satisfying stew of action/adventure flavored with real human drama." —Mystery Scene
"Hurwitz proves to be a master storyteller as he uncouples this riveting barnburner of a thriller. Dark Horse is exquisitely plotted with unexpected twists and deceptions, laced with cinematic fight scenes, brimming with violence and suspense." —Mystery & Suspense
"Excellent...this series just gets better!" —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"One of thrillerdom’s most compelling characters... another sure-fire hit." —Booklist
"A crackerjack thriller that briskly enhances the legend of Orphan X." —Kirkus Reviews
"Gregg Hurwitz has outdone himself this time. The many followers of Orphan X will get whiplash from the unexpected turns and surprises. It was only a matter of time until his Evan Smoak took on the drug cartels. That the main villain is a fully rounded character is unexpectedly moving. The action strikes like lightning." —Luis Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Devil's Highway
★ 03/01/2022
In the new chapter of the "Orphan X" saga (following Prodigal Son), Evan Smoak, aka Orphan X, will need all his skills and experience. After breaking with the government and quitting his role as a secret assassin, X changed his name to the Nowhere Man and adopted a new mission, going to bat for underdogs. Here the daughter of a local crime kingpin is kidnapped in rural Texas by a drug cartel. The kingpin is not entirely bad and is the kind patron of a town and its people. The effort to get the girl back is taut and stressful and allows the Nowhere Man to fight what he hates most: bullies and abusers. The characters are extremely well written, and their back stories are rich and complex. The action carries listeners through the story like a raging torrent. Scott Brick's narration, as always, makes the listen so much more enjoyable. VERDICT This may be the best entry in Hurwitz's series so far. Highly recommended.—Scott DiMarco
09/01/2021
Back when he was the junior member of a CIA action team (and known as Sierra Six), Court Gentry, a.k.a. the Gray Man, helped messily eliminate a terrorist leader who now appears to be very much alive; next in Greaney's No. 1 New York Times best-selling series. In Hood's Robert Ludlum's The Treadstone Transgression, the continuation of a recently launched series, Adam Hayes is asked by his CIA Black Ops program to set up a safe house and is the only survivor when the mission is blown. Dedicated to helping others after having escaped from a shadowy black box program aimed at creating assassins, Evan Smoak, a.k.a. Orphan X, has a new mission in Hurwitz's Dark Horse: rescue the kidnapped daughter of Texas drug overlord Aragon Urrea (200,000-copy first printing). In Jance's Nothing To Lose, retired police detective Beaumont is asked for help by the son of his former partner Sue Danielson, who was murdered years ago by her raging ex-husband. Johansen gives us a big, new Killer View of Jessie Mercado, a Southern California private investigator who surfaces regularly in the "Kendra Michaels" series he writes with his mother, Iris Johansen. In the Edgar Award-winning Kanon's Cold War Berlin-set The Berlin Exchange, two U.S. students and an MI5 operative are being quietly traded far from Checkpoint Charlie for physicist Martin Keller, who had been imprisoned in the UK and now wants to see his ex-wife and son—but what do the East Germans want from him? (125,000-copy first printing). Wending their way through City of the Dead, Kellerman stalwarts Alex Delaware and his buddy, Det. Milo Sturgis, discover a naked, bled-out young man in the streets and a trail of blood leading to the nearby home of sliced-up Cordelia Gannett, an internet influencer Alex knows. Multi-award-winning Northern Irish writer McKinty follows up the New York Times best-selling, Paramount Pictures-ready The Chain with The Chase, so obviously of interest that we won't even worry about the absence of plot details (150,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Mezrich's The Midnight Ride, fresh-from-prison Nick Patterson sneaks into a hotel room on an obligatory job to find his fence dead and scared-witless MIT student Hailey Gordon hiding out after having been caught counting cards; added to this mix is a U.S. history professor's discovery of an unsettling secret about the Revolutionary War (75,000-copy first printing). A domestic-thrills author with 20 Sunday Times best sellers to her name, Parks limns the unaccountable disappearance of two women—contented wife and stepmother Leigh and wealthy, newly married Kai—in cases that shouldn't be linked but seem to be in Both of You (100,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing).
2021-11-17
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.
