Young assassins
With so many up-and-coming literary police and private sleuths, competing crime novelists are having a problem giving them distinctive personalities. They go about their work in much the same way — following up clues, surveillance, interrogating suspects, investigating, checking DNA, computers.
So we’re given one dick who’s a paraplegic, or has adopted children, or has none, or drinks heavily, or is a chain-smoker, or can’t stop eating, or beats toughs to a pulp, or outshoots them, or has his friends helping solve cases, or specialises in taking down terrorists.
Apart from these differences, they are virtually the same person. Honest, incorruptible intrepid, tireless, patriotic — whatever their country. Yet, it is short of saying that reading one such book you’ve read them all. Some authors are better storytellers than others, the twists and turns more clever.
On the downside, plots based on actual events or imaginative ought to be presented plausibly. Alas, all too many writers fall short here. Try though readers will to get onto their wavelength, they can’t do it. In the protagonist’s place, I’d never do that.
This reviewer doesn’t recall which scribe started it, but the idea has caught on that every country has a top secret, super elite group answerable only to the president or prime minister. Their function is to assassinate the nation’s main enemies at home and abroad.
Yank author Gregg Hurwitz’s innovation in Orphan X is for the US government to select promising orphans to train as those killers. Among them is Evan Smoak. Orphan X in his file, he never failed an assignment. But as administrations change, the orphan programme is cancelled, and the liquidation ordered.
For over 400 pages, he’s on the run from his former superiors. Evan takes to applying his lethal talents to helping damsels in distress in Los Angeles. Which I reckon amounts to millions of women. Surely an impossible task. In the event he largely succeeds, taking on the government as well.
He’s different from other literary creations in his taste for the very best vodka. Descriptions of fights, single combat rifles, booby traps, are vivid. As is a dominatrix torturing a male masochist.