Readers,
This week was my assigned week to provide morning tea for the the fine attendees of the 10am service at my church. This may seem like no small feat to you - if so, the illusion of effortless grace is working. In reality, the whole event involved no less than three phone calls (early strategy alignment, game plan, and debrief) with the delightful organizer of the program, the laying out of fine china cups and saucers, as well as several misunderstandings with parishioners who wanted to pour their own tea (this is NOT done). I was supposed to spend Saturday baking banana bread for this affair, but in then end I hurriedly bought tea cakes en route to church, disheveled and already aware of my domestic failure.
Here's what happened - yesterday morning I woke up and moved the seven feet from my bed to my couch. So far so good. Then, I picked up Orphan X by Gregg Hurwitz. The rest is history. By the time a group of friends showed up at my door to down several bowls of soup and several more bottles of wine at seven pm, two things had happened: (1) I had played a shocking game of tennis in the freezing cold, and (2) I finished Orphan X.
The premise is this: Evan Smoak is a disaffected, former member of a US government program that trained and deployed orphans as assassins. Years after leaving the program, Smoak has turned vigilante, helping desperate people throughout LA (I leave for another time the question of whether all citizens of LA ought to be considered desperate) to avoid terrible situations. As is so often the case, Evan's past is about to catch up with him, but in the meantime he's also got a steady flirtation going on with his downstairs neighbor, a love of extremely expensive vodka, a pesky HOA leader to waylay him in the elevator and a penchant to play into the "boys and their toys" stereotype.
Let me say this. If you love Jack Reacher or Gabriel Allon, you will love Evan Smoak. With Orphan X, Greg Hurwitz has delivered a near perfect thriller. The motivating crime is medium-stakes - enough to keep the pages turning, but small enough to be believable.
Books like this, for me, enable a particular kind of escapism. Surrounded by my (admittedly delightful) friends, drinking cheap wine, and eating homemade soup, it's hard for me to explain why I like the idea of a friendless vigilante, drinking hundred-dollar martinis while watching grainy surveillance footage in the dead of night. But I do. For me, it's not just the excitement, or the sexiness of the lifestyle: it's the sense of purpose. Characters like Smoak only make sense to readers because we understand the single-mindedness of their motivations. They don't have families or friends or real jobs because all that would be a distraction. They live for the hunt, for the pursuit of justice. It's all very uncomplicated, and I'm sure it's very lonely. But there's something deeply appealing about that simplicity of Smoak's purpose.
Readers, let me say it this way: Evan Smoak has found his vocation. He helps the helpless (the vodka is just a perk) by killing bad guys. I haven't found my vocation yet. I hope, though, that one day I do - although I equally hope mine involves fewer bullet wounds.
Orphan X was gifted to me by my friend Caroline. Caroline was at dinner last night, and we spent so much of the evening discussing the book that one of our friends picked it up off my coffee table and started reading it then and there. That was absolutely the right decision. So, readers, if you've got a rainy Saturday, or just need an excuse not to bake banana bread, here's my advice: Go out and get Orphan X. Clear your schedule. Enjoy.
Here's a snippet from the sequel, Nowhere Man (yes, I already started it), which gives you a perfect sense of the drama and pace of Hurwitz' prose: "an older man with a cane and a fresh limp finds her sobbing in the bathroom of a 7-Eleven...He gives her a phone number: 1-855-2-NOWHERE. A magical fix-it line.
She dials.
Evan Smoak picks up.
"Do you need my help?" he asks.
That's how it works."