With his digital-age The Avenger, Hurwitz races by minor plot holes and spins a web of relentless intrigue with bursts of...
Kicking off a new series, Hurwitz (Don’t Look Back, 2014, etc.) sets young Evan Smoak, a one-time government assassin, to work as a pro bono equalizer—one call brings a criminal to justice.
The 9/11 terror attacks made major bad guys targets for undercover termination, and so a darker-than-black government agency created the Orphan Program. That group trained throwaway kids as the world’s most efficient assassins "for solo, offline covert operations." Then "drones changed everything," and the Orphans were left in limbo. Orphan X, Evan, decided to freelance, his impetus being his belief that his Orphan mentor (and substitute father), Jack Johns, was murdered. Soon, a Hezbollah arms chief, a dealer in fissile material, and a serial rapist receive Evan’s justice. All it takes is a quick call to his victim’s hotline, 1-855-2NOWHERE. Evan’s back story arrives in short, scene-style chapters. The primary narrative follows Evan as he takes on new projects. His lair is a luxury Los Angeles condo, the atmosphere set by neighboring busybodies, where he has a secret vault with Google-level technology. Hurwitz offers a glimpse of Evan’s modus operandi as the assassin eliminates a dirty cop coercing an immigrant teen into prostitution. Then the tale spins down into double crosses and duplicities as Evan becomes a target and other former Orphans enter the fray. High-tech gadgetry abounds—microscopic internal GPS transmitters, a "fully pixelated contact lens" for digital communication—but Evan is old school too, mastering esoteric Filipino, Japanese, and Indonesian martial arts. Hurwitz closes with an unexpected narrative left turn, but even though he’s painted Evan adequately, including vague hints of possible romance with neighbor Mia, a widowed single mother, Evan will need another adventure or two before he grows into an empathetic hero.
With his digital-age The Avenger, Hurwitz races by minor plot holes and spins a web of relentless intrigue with bursts of tensely sketched violence.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-06784-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Reid’s tightly crafted tale toys with the nature of identity and comes by its terror honestly, building a wall of...
A road trip in a snowstorm takes a sinister turn for a man and his girlfriend, the novel’s unnamed narrator.
Reid’s preternaturally creepy debut unfolds like a bad dream, the kind from which you desperately want to wake up yet also want to keep dreaming so you can see how everything fits together—or, rather, falls apart. The narrator, known only as the girlfriend, is driving with her beau, Jake, a scientist, to meet his parents at the family farm. The relationship is new, but, as the title implies, she’s already thinking of calling it quits. Jake is somewhat strange and fond of philosophizing, though the tendency to speak in the abstract is something that unites the pair. The weather outside turns nastier, and Reid intercuts the couple’s increasingly tense journey with short interstitial chapters that imply a crime has been committed, though the details are vague. Matters don’t improve when Jake and the narrator arrive at the farm, a hulking collection of buildings in the middle of nowhere. The meeting with her potential in-laws is as awkward as it is frightening, with Reid expertly needling the reader—and the narrator—into a state of near-blind panic with every footfall on a basement step. On the drive back, Jake makes a detour to an empty high school, which will take the couple to new heights of the terrifying and the bizarre.
Reid’s tightly crafted tale toys with the nature of identity and comes by its terror honestly, building a wall of intricately layered psychological torment so impenetrable it’s impossible to escape.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2692-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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