Book review: The Nowhere Man

Author: Gregg Hurwitz

Reviewed by: Samantha Keogh

Review made possible by: Penguin Random House

It has spent years training them to become throw-away assassins who travel the world dispatching its enemies.

Inevitably the conscience, which it was thought had been obliterated, trickles through the orphans’ consciousness and some of them try to stop what they are doing.

One result is Evan Smoak, and several others have managed to escape the programme.

Most have been obliterated by those who shaped them.

However, Evan has remained unscathed and uses his skill and unlimited wealth to respond to calls to his high-tech satellite phone from people in distress.

The idea might not be new (one hears whispers of the X-Men) but Hurwitz has skilfully managed to introduce a new character to the genre.

In this, the second Evan Smoak novel, Evan is captured drugged and transported to … well, initially he thinks he is in Switzerland but soon changes his mind.

It is his wealth, not his expertise, which interests his captor who is not even aware of how dangerous Evan is.

At the back of his ageing kidnaper’s mind is the need to fund an expensive lifestyle and, more importantly, a quest for youth that involves the transfusion of the

blood of twenty-something party-goers into his own veins.

Evan’s main concern is to escape in time to help a young woman who has been sold and in days will fall into the hands of the man who purchased her.

Keeping him imprisoned in a luxurious room are cameras, regular doses of sleeping gas, a slew of hard men hired from a drug cartel, a giant, two snipers and a man who is desperate for Evan to sign off on a money transfer.

The government is also still on his trail.

Suffice it to say reinforcements are needed.

Hurwitz, a product of Harvard and Oxford, is no neophyte.

He has at least 17 novels to his credit and his writing attests to his competence.