Dark Horse by Greg Hurwitz (2022)
Once I started reading this new harrowing adventure of Greg Hurwitz's indominable assassin Evan Smoak (aka. The Nowhere Man'), I knew all mundane things like sleeping would stop until I raced to the last page.
The Nowhere Man, raised since childhood to become a black ops lethal assassin, broke away from his handlers to live a life as a kind of modern day, hi-tech Knight Errant, coming to the rescue of those facing overwhelming odds. And in 'Dark Horse' he bends his moral compass somewhat to accept a desperate mission from Aragon Urrea, a powerful, shady kingpin presiding over an illegal drug running empire.
Urrea's cherished, beloved 18 year old daughter Angelina has been kidnapped by his most despised and dangerous rival from the Leones drug cartel in Mexico. Its leader, the psychotically violent Raul Montesco, presides over his own vast horrific kingdom where enslaved trafficked women are kept in cages and those who incur Montesco's wrath are fed alive to his pet lion.
Evan and Urrea come to an uneasy reckoning with each other about Evan deploying his considerable skills to help a man who operates outside the law in moral twilight......and agrees to undertake an unbelievably near suicidal undercover mission to extract Angelina from the cartel compound, This means single handedly outwitting, outfighting and and outgunning Montesco, his two sadistic bodyguards and a veritable army of heavily armed minions.
From that point on, the action is non-stop, breathless, graphic beyond description and filled with twists and excruciating suspense. (Imagine that Timothy Dalton Bond-Vs-Drug Lord film "Licence To Kill" if it had a juiced up with a hard R rating and directed by Quentin Tarantino.).
The Nowhere Man is no invincible superhero - he endures as much physical punishment as he hands out. And for all of us fans of the Orphan X universe, there's more wonderful byplay, both hilarious and touching between Evan and Joey Morales, the feisty, suffer-no-fools, delinquent girl whose genius command of computer hacking helps Evan infiltrate the cartel.
'Dark Horse' works just fine as a stand alone in the Orphan X series so you don't necessarily have to read previous books in the series before this one.......but once you finish it, you'll want to dive into the others like.....uh...yesterday. I dearly love reading any book where I don't have to hem and haw about how to rate it. and this one's an immediate, barn-burnin' 5 star read from start to finish. (*****)
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