Hellbent

September 1, 2017

Evan Smoak is Orphan X, trained to be an unacknowledged government assassin and now working to help the truly desperate. In this third in a hot new series, he's tasked by his old boss with protecting the program's final recruit, targeted when the new head plans to obliterate the remaining assets.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 30, 2017
In bestseller Hurwitz’s thrilling third Orphan X novel (after 2017’s The Nowhere Man), Evan Smoak, who once worked as an assassin for the Orphan Program, a covert U.S. government agency, and now helps people in trouble from his base in L.A., violates one of the agency’s fundamental commandments: never make it personal. Evan’s mentor, Jack Johns, who recruited Evan at age 12 to the program, calls Evan’s help line. Soon afterward, operatives following the orders of Charles Van Sciver, another Orphan, take Jack prisoner aboard a Blackhawk helicopter. In an exciting action scene, Jack manages to sabotage the helicopter, but pays with his life. Evan decides to honor Jack’s last request to take care of a “package,” which turns out to be a teenage girl, who is, like Evan, also in Van Sciver’s crosshairs. The master killer hoping for redemption and struggling to relate to others emotionally may be a genre cliché, but such details as Evan’s sleeping on a bed levitated by magnets are sure to please fans of the Roger Moore Bond films. 150,000 announced first printing; author tour. Agent: Lisa Erbach Vance, Aaron Priest Literary Agency

November 15, 2017
Bodies pile up in the third entry in the Orphan X series (Nowhere Man, 2017, etc.).Orphan X, now Evan Smoak, is the Nowhere Man. People, usually strangers, can call him on his untraceable phone to ask for help if they are in desperate trouble. So his father figure, Jack Johns, calls him shortly before stepping out of a flying helicopter to his death. Then Evan receives Jack's posthumous note about a "final mission" to get a "package" that turns out to be Joey, a testy teenage girl and fellow Orphan who at first tries to kill him. Meanwhile, Charles Van Sciver, Director of the Orphan Program, is hellbent on his own mission. His "top priority [is] to stamp out wayward Orphans," especially Orphan X, the one who escaped from the program. Evan obsesses about killing Van Sciver and everyone else who helped kill Jack, so rivers of blood surge toward a showdown. Joey becomes Evan's sidekick, but she might become an "inconvenient aggravation at the very moment that Evan's universe would compress down in the service of a single goal--the annihilation of Charles Van Sciver." There's the hint of a sequel with Van Sciver's taunt to Evan--"You have no idea, do you? How high it goes?" That's thriller-talk for Someone Living on Pennsylvania Avenue. And that Someone also wants Evan dead. All this slaughtering keeps him too busy for a love life, although he has an almost-girlfriend, DA Mia Hall. Another woman hits on him, but he "needed to get food, and then he had people to kill." Priorities, you know. Some characters will be familiar to readers of the series, such as Van Sciver and the voluptuous but deadly Candy McClure. Most colorful, though, is the gangster named Freeway, who has--oh yeah!--a tattooed eyeball.As well-done as the rest of the series and bloody good fun.

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Starred review from October 1, 2017
Hurwitz sets himself quite a challenge in the latest Evan Smoak thriller: he gives the lone-wolf former government assassin a sidekick. And not just any sidekick: a precocious 16-year-old girl, a former assassin-in-training named Joey. But if you're worrying that this book trades intense suspense and slam-bang action for sappy sitcom moments, you can stop. This is a great novel, perhaps the darkest in the series so far. Sent into a single-minded rage by the death of his mentor, the only person he has ever cared about, Evan vows to track down and eradicate the man responsible: Charles Van Sciver, current head of the top-secret Orphan Program (before Evan went rogue, he was Orphan X). The question he must answer is, If it comes down to it, will he sacrifice the life of a girl he barely knows to satisfy his primal need for revenge? Until Evan makes that decision, we really don't know what he will dothat's the beauty and brilliance of the character Hurwitz has created. The story moves as fast as a bullet train, and we've never seen Evan Smoak as emotionally exposed as he is here. Do not miss this one.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Hurwitz and his Evan Smoak thrillers have been steadily growing in popularity, and this one will accelerate the pace dramatically.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)