Former shadow wars assassin turned pro bono one-man A-Team for those in need, Evan Smoak - the titular Nowhere Man who’s also called Orphan X; jaysis make up your mind, man! - is kidnapped by a vampiric rich dude who only knows Evan has cash that he wants. And then he finds out who Evan REALLY is and things kick up a notch. Gawrsh, however will Evan get out of this scrape?!
Gregg Hurwitz’s second Orphan X “thriller” is about as good as his first which is to say that it’s just an ok read - as you can probably tell from the quotation marks, I didn’t find it especially thrilling.
A lot of that has to do with the rather spare story. Evan’s stuck in a room in an isolated complex for most of the nearly 400 page(!) novel with Hurwitz laboriously documenting his numerous escape attempts. It’s kinda like a literary adaptation of Chumbawumba’s Tubthumping as Evan gets knocked down, gets up again, and so on - it’s repetitive stuff.
The narrative is slow and overlong. Reading extensive action sequences isn’t any more exciting now than it was in the last novel. “Shocking” reveals about certain characters aren’t that shocking mostly because I still haven’t connected to the stoic and distant Evan so I don’t really care about these big life changes. The two people in need of The Nowhere Man are continually mentioned throughout but are dealt with each in a handful of pages at the end very anticlimactically.
The book definitely has some fine moments though. Not all the escape attempts are dull and the final one is pretty damn entertaining. Evil rich dude Rene is a bit of a one-dimensional Thomas Harris-esque character (Mason Verger) but he’s also undeniably interesting and I liked the rogue Orphan, Candy, a lot too.
Like the first Orphan X, The Nowhere Man is a decent action novel with enough fun scenes dotted throughout to never become overwhelmingly tedious. It could definitely do with some trimming though and, like a lot of action stories, it’s not very memorable either. Certainly nothing special - for fans of the genre only.
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