Gregg Hurwitz - Orphan X

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good, slightly silly action thriller

Orphan X is a load of utterly preposterous old hokum, and I rather liked it.

It's pretty much a by-numbers action thriller with lots of the tropes and clichés of the genre well in evidence.  A secret, deniable Government programme takes orphans at an early age and trains them to be deadly agents and assassins, and our protagonist, Evan Smoak, needless to say, the "best of the best."   He is trained by a tough but wise surrogate father who is hard and deadly but, needless to say, reads Homer and Churchill's History Of The English Speaking Peoples.  Evan has "left the program" and now does pro-bono work – i.e. he acts as a superhero, helping people in impossible situations and killing Bad Guys.  However, needless to say, Evan's morals are tested, he meets a single mother and her son and, needless to say, Emotions Begin To Intrude as Family Values begin to emerge.  He also, needless to say, ends up in a kill-or-be-killed conflict with the other Best Of The Best.  I'm sure you get the picture.

The thing is, it's well done.  It may be cliché-d nonsense, but it's decently written, quite gripping, well structured and with plenty of action sequences – all scripted exactly as though they were movie scenes, which I'm sure Gregg Hurwittz wants them to be made into.  There's also a lot of Top-Gear-For-Killers geekery about equipment - and who knew that vodka could be such a specialist interest?  Or that it could be so boring to read about?  All this means that Evan Smoak is a cross between James Bond and Batman and that's how the book reads.  As an entertaining diversion it works pretty well (although the Climactic Confrontation goes on far too long and becomes quite staggeringly silly) as long as you don't try to apply logic to it – like asking where he gets the money for all this astoundingly expensive, apparently disposable equipment, cars, properties and so on.

I can recommend this as a decent, if rather mindless, action thriller.  It's the start of a series and even though I quite enjoyed the book, I suspect that one is quite enough for me and I won't be bothering with any more.