The badass amalgamation of Bond, Bourne, Reacher and Batman is back in a fourth instalment in the Orphan X saga — and this time it’s personal!
Evan Smoak is Orphan X, aka ‘The Nowhere Man;’ a one-time government assassin (as part of the covert ‘Orphan’ program) turned into a pro bono harbinger of justice, whose Bat Signal is a cell phone number. Over the course of this scenery-smashing series, a mysterious foe has been targeting Orphans for assassination. When we last caught up with Evan (2018’s Hellbent) he identified the orchestrator of the killings: none other than the President of the United States, the morally bankrupt Jonathan Bennett. Now, in Out of the Dark, it’s Evan out for blood; in Washington DC to exact revenge on the most powerful and well-protected man on the planet. Piece of cake, right?
Naturally, Evan is side-tracked by a ‘Nowhere Man’ case, but this time it feels like more of a subplot than imperative to the narrative; like Hurwitz was conscious he needed to give readers a break from Evan’s hunt for the President, just to remind readers he’s not exclusively a rogue government assassin, and that he abides by a moral code. When Trevon Gaines discovers his immediate family have been slaughtered by drug-smuggling he inadvertently crossed, he calls Evan’s encrypted line, and thus Orphan X finds himself aiding an intellectually challenged, but incredibly sweet and well-intentioned young man, which leads to a brilliant climactic battle that had me genuinely dumbfounded as to how Hurwitz would write Evan out of a particularly harrowing quandary.
Gregg Hurwitz has crammed an insane amount of action into his Orphan X quartet, but he doesn’t relish in the bloodbaths his characters unleash with stunning regularity. Bodies are bruised and bloodied amidst the chaos, and there’s always a moment of reflection when — win, lose or draw — its perpetrators realise their lives will never be anything but violent; it’s cyclical and senseless, and by mastering its craft they’ve fallen into an inescapable chasm that renders any chance of a normal life impossible. Even when Evan wins, he loses.
Fast, furious, frenetic; Out of the Dark ends Evan Smoke’s inaugural story-arc, tying off several loose threads from previous novels. Wherever the character goes from here, I’ll be there with him. Nobody writes a better high-stakes action thriller than Hurwitz.
ISBN: 9780718185497
Format: Paperback / softback
Pages: 448
Imprint: Michael Joseph Ltd
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publish Date: 5-Feb-2019
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
With Heart of the Grass Tree, Molly Murn cements herself as not only one of Australia’s most exciting up-and-coming novelists, but a brilliant novelist of Australia.
A strangely sedate opening eighty pages — by Matthew Reilly standards, anyway, as he explores the cutthroat world of New York’s richest teenage socialites — soon disintegrates into the pedal to the metal chaos fans expect; only this time, there’s time travel, and the end of the world as its backdrop.
A fairly conventional whodunnit plot — a police detective is sent to investigate what happened on Elliðaey (an archipelago consisting of more than 15 islands located south of Iceland) after one member of a group of friends fails to return from their trip — is elevated into the top tier by one of the finest authors of crime fiction today. Although it lacks the percussion blast climax of The Darkness
Published in 1997, Steve Hamilton’s A Cold Day in Paradise — the first book in the Alex McKnight series — has its share of boilerplate elements, but by deftly integrating its protagonist’s past and present in his search for a murderer, unreeling the mystery with an escalating sense of tension 
The trouble with Machines Like Me is that for however eloquent and incisive Ian McEwan’s ruminations on artificial intelligence and its relationship to human beings are, there’s a prevailing sense that this cautionary tale has been told before, and more dynamically. All the questions the narrative poses — What makes us human? Could a machine ever understand the human heart? — have been asked before, and answered. McEwan plunges headfirst into the ethical conundrums of machines masquerading as men and women, but the result is more pedestrian than prescient.
In The Other Americans, Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami uses the hit-and-run death of a Moroccan father in the Mojave Desert to interrogate ideas of identity, nationality, immigration and belonging.