PattyMacDotComma's Reviews > Hellbent

4.5★
“‘Can you hack it?’
She kept her head lowered, her fingers moving. ‘I’m gonna pretend you didn’t ask me that.’
He cast an eye toward the facility’s front door. ‘The cops are gonna be here soon.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘then it’s a good thing I’m fast.’”

This one kept me enthusiastic all the way through. I like the returning characters and the new ones. There’s still some grim stuff, but not quite so much spelled out (or maybe I just got good at skimming, but I don’t think so).

The conversation above is Evan Smoakes (the Nowhere Man) and Joey, his 16-year-old offsider of sorts, who has somehow ended up in his care. I think these books are better read in order, but I have to say, if I hadn’t heard how much the series improved, I probably wouldn’t have continued. I’m glad I did.

“Evan’s scuffed knuckles, a fetching post-fight shade of eggplant, ledged the steering wheel. His nose was freshly broken, leaking a trickle of crimson. Nothing bad, more a shifting along old fault lines.”

We know Evan is a killer, trained in some kind of special government program where he was taken as a young orphan and brought up learning all the intricacies of self-defence, weapons and munitions, hiding in plain sight, and a lot of computer skills. He’s also had some kind of relationship with Mia and her young son down the hall. A bit of romance that he can’t afford, given his lifestyle. But she and Peter are pretty good at spotting his various war wounds. And he still wishes he could maybe have a normal life. If only.

Joey, the fast worker in the opening quote, was a newly-recruited orphan whose training was interrupted, and she really IS a computer-hacking whizz. She’s pretty hard-bitten for 16 and has good reason to be.

Evan is completely out of his depth dealing with her, since his only real understanding of family was with Jack, his handler who raised him and treated him like a son. It’s the closest Evan’s come to having a parent. But the raising involved all the martial arts, how to get forged papers, how to travel the world and kill people without being discovered.

“Jack had trained him for so many contingencies, had made him lethal and worldly and cultured. But not domestic.”

So, out of his depth. We meet up with the worst of the baddies from the previous books. Van Sciver is in charge of eradicating any trace of the orphan program, particularly wiping Orphan X, Evan Smoakes, off the face of the earth.

As well as Joey, who’s both a help and a teen-aged hindrance, we also meet a whole new bunch of delightful drug runners from El Salvador.

“The tattoos were overwhelming. Pentagrams and names of the dear departed. Crossbones, grenades, dice, daggers, machetes. And words—words in place of eyebrows, blue letters staining lips, nicknames rendered across throats in Old English letters. Other tattoos coded for crimes the men had committed—rape, murder, kidnapping. Their rap sheets, inked right on their faces.”

Then there was this guy!

“It was his eyes. They were solid black. . . . The man had tattooed the whites of his eyes.”

ACK! Is that even possible? I enjoyed reading how our intrepid heroes (I include Joey) deal with so many enemies. Evan has a habit of counting the people he needs to eliminate, counting his bullets, and then keeping score as the story progresses.

We just know he can’t possibly have enough ammunition to win the day – it isn’t humanly possible. Is it? Read it and see! As for me, I’m waiting for the next book.

Thanks to NetGalley and St Martin’s Press for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted.

#Hellbent #NetGalley