Marilyn's Mystery Reads

If anyone can write thrillers that keep you on the edge of your seat, it’s Gregg Hurwitz.  In Out of the Dark, the fourth book in the Orphan X series, the protagonist must discover why his first assignment twenty years ago may have a connection to why he is being targeted to be killed now.

We never learn exactly how X came to live in a group home for boys.  When he was twelve his foster father Jack took him from the home, gave him the name Evan Smoak, and began grooming him to be an assassin as part of a clandestine group run by the Department of Defense.

Evan is nineteen when he is ordered to assassinate the prime minister of an Eastern European country.  After he successfully completes that mission, Jack tells him to kill the man who sold him the gun used in the murder and the man who sold him the bullet’s cartridge with a mysterious fingerprint on it.  When Evan questions this order, Jack simply tells him to …”execute them.  Close the operation.”  And he does.

After about a decade in the Orphan Program, Evan begins to have doubts about the integrity of its purpose and flees the organization.  He has amassed a great deal of money and has no need to work, and he has decided to spend the rest of his life helping those without resources who have nowhere else to turn.  He calls himself the Nowhere Man.

Now, in 2019, Evan has an even more difficult assignment, one he has given himself.  He has determined to assassinate the president of the United States.

President Jonathan Bennett had been an undersecretary at the Department of Defense when Evan entered the Program.  Although the Program was extremely successful in its mission to assassinate those whom the DoD deemed to be its enemies, now that Bennett is president he needs to make certain that any trace of this top-secret operation is eliminated.  And that means eliminating all of the Orphans.

Evan is apparently on the top of Bennett’s kill list for reasons having to do with the 1997 murders in Europe, Evan’s first assignment.  Evan doesn’t understand why that project was so vital at the time and why his participation in it makes it necessary for him to be murdered now.  So, while Evan is planning to assassinate Bennett, Bennett is arranging to have Evan killed.

The success of Evan’s plan seems to be impossible, given the incredible level of security surrounding the president.  When Bennett travels from the White House, it is in a convoy of three identical cars to disguise which one is transporting him.  The presidential limo weighs nearly eight tons, its body covered in armor.  The windows are made of bullet-proof glass, and a steel plate beneath the car protects it from bombs.  This, of course, is in addition to the phalanx of Secret Service personnel surrounding him at all times.  Bennett would seem unreachable.

There is no let-up in the action in Out of the Dark, leaving the reader in suspense until the very end.  It is the very definition of the word thriller.

You can read more about Gregg Hurwitz at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.