The Nowhere Man

Plots and subplots abound in the second of Hurwitz’s thrillers featuring Evan Smoak, the ultimate assassin, who now uses his killing ways and bulging bank accounts to benefit mankind while avoiding his former associates in the covert Orphan Program, who want him dead. He’s juggling a couple of cases­—a young woman on her way to international sex slavers and a boy in equally dire straits—when he himself falls victim to a world-class kidnapper, winding up trapped in a fortress in a frigid, mountainous, probably foreign country. Reader Brick’s relentlessly intense enactment tips Hurwitz’s energized, violence-prone style into melodrama, but he also matches the author’s feverish pacing, and that’s enough to keep the material compelling. [em]A Minotaur hardcover. (Jan.) [/em]