Orphan X by Gregg Hurwitz

As a boy, Evan Smoak was taken from an orphanage. Raised and trained in a top-secret programme, he was sent to bad places to do things the government denied ever happened. Then he broke with the programme, using what he'd learned to vanish. Now he helps the desperate and deserving.
But someone's on his trail. Someone who knows his past and believes that the boy once known as Orphan X must die . . .

(Publisher's blurb)

Two gripes on an otherwise very good, pacy action-packed thriller of a book. The first and most annoying is the insistence on such short chapters – are we readers really so unable to absorb more than a page or two of text at a time? Is it the dumbing-down into millennium-aged preferred sound-bites? Or am I just a cranky older reader? I don’t know but it infuriated me in this book. While admittedly adding to the fast pace of the action the chopping and changing of scenes and viewpoints was an annoyance; chapters of barely one page at times.

My second gripe is that the author’s name did not appear on the cover of the copy I read so that I really struggled to remember it. The author’s name is important to me; if I like the book I will hunt out others, and I will likely as not recognise the name when discovering it in future, in reviews or other commentary and feedback. 

The cover did contain glowing endorsement quotes from such heavyweights as David Baldacci, Lee Child, Jonathan Kellerman and Tess Gerritsen. If this is your genre then David Baldacci’s comment “Read this book. You will thank me later.” is spot on.

Posted by Catherine

Catalogue link: Orphan X