Hellbent

Written by Glenn Hurwitz & Reviewed by Detective Dru

The prologue is just outstanding writing. Evan aka Orphan X is being chased by three cops in a stolen car near Portland with someone in his trunk.   The entire prologue was just summarized in one sentence, yet somehow the author turns it into multiple pages of glorious tension filled drama.  Unfortunately, this would be the high water mark for the entire book.

Evan’s mentor Jack calls his RoamZone and gives his last words. He seeks forgiveness for making Evan into Orphan X. LIVE goes dead then rings with a different voice - likely Charles van Sciver, head of the orphan program and hellbent on eradicating Evan since he went off grid and abandoned the program.

Chapter two retreats to five days earlier. Charles and Thornville are trekking thru Amazonian forest looking for a downed plane. They find it and examine a corpse until they find a synthetic eyelash (!) containing sensitive intel. Charles smiles despite his heavy scarring and fake eye that orphan X gave him in previous books.

Jordan Harville, agent R, collars Jack and puts him in a chopper. He still won’t cooperate or reveal X’s whereabouts. He sabotages the chopper and they all die. Evan watches it all via the digital lens van Sciver also has access to. (Made possible by the previous book)

Evan sees Mia and Peter and some other annoying neighbor on his way out to check his safe houses in LA county.  There are so many “in between the beats” chapters like this one and good god does it drag the book down. 

Evan finds Jack’s truck in Alabama where they had their last conversation on the phone. Jack had mentioned fog and Evan deduced he left a message on the unfoggy windshield. Get a package in Oregon. (paraphrasing)

Evan goes to Portland and finds some girl in the Jack apartment that attacks suddenly with a knife.  They tussle but he quickly restrains her.  Now they have ally energy. Orphan team shows up before the girl and Evan sneak out some secret passage. He tosses her in a Cadillac trunk and speeds away to evade capture, noticing a particular parkour orphan that is likely his henchmen for act 3. Evan accuses a lot of people of being orphans.

Chapter 12 is just the prologue again. Don’t care for this literary device, especially when it landed so well in the opening.  Now it feels like experiencing the cheap knock off bargain bin version of the high end retail from the prologue.  Evan takes out three cops, two with his car and one with his gun.  The third cop was only disarmed by the bullet. He radios in that he apprehended Evan so there’s no more pursuit. Then Evan neutralizes the cop car and abandons the cop.

After talking to the girl, Evan realizes that she knows Jack because she knows the Orphan commandments, as taught by Jack. She’s Joey, 16, and she used to be an orphan for van Sciver, but then she was unceremoniously released from the program. Evan realizes that she is the package that Jack wanted him to care for.

Evan and Joey hole up in a motel in Portland. She reveals disdain for van Sciver and his disinterest in her progress. Evans finds a birthday card in her bag from “M” while she showered? How is this possible for an orphan? Then she holds a knife to his throat in the middle of the night and urges him to promise not to hurt her.  Family stuff, amiright?

Evan drops Joey off at a train station but bad guys show up.  Evan defeats said bad guys but draws police presence who trap the two before they can escape.  So, Joey pretends to be Evan’s daughter, throwing a tantrum to trick the cops, then Evan shoots one lookout dude using an oil filter and flannel shirt as suppression?? Then he steals some gps stick from the lookout car.  It was somewhere around here that the spidey sense really started to tingle.  The juxtaposition between the tension that ended Chapter 17 and the silly ham-fisted sitcom like resolution to their predicament to open 18 rubbed the wrong way.  Is this a James Bond story or an Austin Powers satire?  You can be one or you can be neither, but you can’t be both.

The van Sciver HQ is some plantation in Alabama funded by the Treasury. To the author’s credit, this should be our first clue to the reader that this is going to be “way bigger” than the characters involved.  Van Sciver went to school with Evan and was outshone by him despite being the prize student, hence the motive. (speaking of Austin Powers) He learns the mission to snatch the girl failed.

Chapter 22 was a well written ambush & interrogation chapter. Evan and Joey stakeout to discover a secret knock to some place. Then he blows it to hell with buck shot and questions some guy who gives up a black orphan as well as a female orphan.  Candy & Orphan V.

Evan uses the dead man’s phone to contact van Sciver and taunt him. Honestly, their rivalry doesn’t do much for me.   The two words that keep coming to mind while reading this book are contrived and melodrama.  And this chapter was no exception.  They were school rivals, but I just picture Austin Powers and Dr. Evil in their flashback scene. 

Chapter 24 is another road trip! They’re in Montana at a diner and Joey says she failed van Sciver because she didn’t pass the Kingsman kill test, but with a deserving dude in a duffel bag instead of an innocent puppy. They argue about splitting up/ sticking together. Then his RoamZone rings for the Nowhere Man.  Some Hispanic called from LA; his son joined a gang. Evan declines initially but then relents. Him and Joey steal a car and head toward the caller.

Orphan V is Candy, the femme fatale. She’s tasked with ending her current target early so she can focus on X. She hates X because of some scar on her back. She kills some super-pac donor with a sharpened candy cane.

Then, more Evan & Joey chatter. The lady that sends her the cards is her maunt. (mom aunt) And apparently in some sort of home that’s “end-stopped?”  But one card is all weathered even though it’s a week old?

Chapter 32 was yet another pointless chapter. We’re back at his safe house…then Evan does recon on Benito, the guy that called his RoamZone. Sounds like he’s in medical debt. Then Mia calls Evan’s landline. 

Elsewhere, Candy abducts Agent L with a syringe and a skirt.  But don’t worry, we’ll get back to more cutesy Evan and Joey odd couple bonding. Too much character development that’s really just relationship development and it’s causing the story to lack any tension or urgency whatsoever.

Evan finally visits Benito the caller and he legit just wants Evan to talk his son out of joining MS-13. This must be a trap by the author because this is a contradiction to Evan’s character to accept something like this, especially with all the Joey & van Sciver stuff going.  Plus his Commandment 1 is one mission at a time. Nope, I was wrong, this was not author trap, this was just author crap.

Draker the orphan is tied up for van Sciver, ready for torture. He wants to know about some boy Jack hid in Richmond in relation to X somehow.  The boy is David Smith (original!) and Joey and X need to find him because van Sciver wants him? Kinda silly really. It’s a race to find the boy, who really has nothing to do with either of these two underwhelming parallel plots.

They get to Evan’s real safe house and then go to Target where they bump into Mia and Peter, to Evan’s chagrin.  Mixed message Mia is upset that Evan is with some 16 year old, because he once told her he has no family.  Another wasted chapter.

Evan finds Xavier’s apartment and tries to convince him to leave MS-13 and flee to El Salvador. They debate redemption.  Evan returns to the safe house and the place is chaotic because Joey rearranged all the tech in the vault. There’s just way too much of this Odd Couple type fluff in this book. Not nearly enough forward momentum.  75% of this book could’ve been cut and the story would still be the same disappointing one that it is.

Evan’s software gets a hit on the boy David Smith, somewhere in Richmond. (Just as Orphan L breaks the same intel for van Sciver.) Evan gets to the orphanage only to find Dave disappeared that morning. They think he ran away but it looks like an abduction to Evan.  Joey uses silliness to track what happened. Using a streetlight (!), she finds footage of the kidnapping and IDs the perps. Evan recognizes Candy. Then they upload fake warrants on the suspects to get the police on them and help with locating them.

Van Sciver and Candy debate what to do with the kid - train as orphan vs eliminate - while Thornhill the parkour orphan makes propofol to administer.  Evan and Joey then track some Suburban to the hideout where van Sciver and multiple orphans are working over the child Dave Smith. Evan surveils them then calls 911 on himself, but a different location.  Most of the gang heads to the daycare center where they think Evan is per the 911 call van Sciver intercepted.  Instead, Evan takes out the bodyguards that remain behind and rescues a drugged up Dave Smith.  But they chipped the kid so they find Evan and Joey and Dave immediately.  Then cliches abound, galore! Cops show up right before the showdown. Evan may or may not have removed the chip. Thornhill shot his own guys from a huge distance after seeing that they were detained by cops. Finally, the cops surround Evan and Joey and Dave.  They pose as family to trick the cops into dismissing them as instigators in the shootout. Kinda lame, and didn’t we already do this 100 pages ago? Then they stop outside town and David throws a tantrum because he wants to go back to van Sciver to join the orphan program. They try to reason but he refuses. Joey posts Dave’s photo online as a kidnapped kid in order to save him from van Sciver’s wrath, as van Sciver needs to remain clandestine. The kid is furious. Evan and Joey abandon him after telling his old daycare about his location. Kinda weird and a real unsatisfying end to the kid’s arc.  He didn’t need to be in the story in the first place, and now there was no point to him in retrospect.  He was just a mcguffin shoehorned in between two other uninspiring mcguffins.   

But in the meantime, here’s a quick wild goose chase for a false gps to show the rift between van Sciver and Candy.  Evan apparently did remove the gps chip and managed to feed it to a duck.  You couldn’t have made it a goose Glenn?  At least a wild one that fancies chases?

Oh good, chapter 59 is another contrived bonding chat at a hotel. This time Evan’s RoamZone rings as he and Joey sleep. It’s Xavier and he wants out of his gang. There’s under 100 pages left and still no purpose to this subplot…SPOILER there will never be a purpose to this subplot.  This book is a disaster.

OK, buckle up.  President Bennett (as in POTUS as in gimme a break) is in the Oval Office and on the phone with orphan Y aka van Sciver, is saying how important it is to kill X because of his connective tissue to the White House.  Also, apparently POTUS knows how to NOT SWEAT no matter how hot things get for him, and this has suited him politically in the past. What in the name of freaking Prince Andrew is this author going on about?

Admittedly, 63 is a better chapter. Evan talks his way into meeting with Freeman, Xavier’s gang leader, then says he’ll be back in 24 hours for one of his men. Keeps playing on the leader’s ego to keep Freeman from killing him.

Then a Joey POV chapter. Literally the first corner she turns and she’s getting assaulted sexually, which she of course ass beats her way out if it. Even after school specials were not as cheesy as the melodramatic writing in this chapter.  But fret not, because more chat bonding is on the horizon as Joey & Evan drive to Phoenix to use Joey as bait while she visits her dead maunt’s grave.   And of course, more silliness abounds. There were eyes at the cemetery as Evan suspected. They spiked a drink with gps molecules and tried to get Joey to drink it at a cafe but Evan swooped in and drank it all. Then they tail them on the highway to a parking garage where Evan repels down the garage spiral section and shoots the driver in the temple. Then he rips the fake spoiler that he conveniently owned (off the car they stole mind you) and then rips some fiber optic coating off the Nissan so it’s white now and van Sciver won’t know to track it because they also changed the plates. All happening within like a minute with a dead body and gunfire in the garage too. Even comic books aren’t this disrespectful to their readers in regards to plausibility.  Not seeing a reason to continue this series…but wait, oh cool, a quick pitstop to see some foster woman that partially raised Joey so she could tell her to F off real quick, since they were already in Phoenix. Really rough storytelling.

And that brings us to Chapter 69.  Holy Christ, the worst chapter yet. Evan goes to the ms13 church and eats a Snickers bar, activating the gps he drank earlier.  So a Blackhawk chopper (!) shows up within seconds (!) and shoots all the gang, while Evan conveniently hides in some silly NASA jacket that blocks out both gps and thermal imaging.  Yeah that high tech jacket was just laying around the MS-13 gang’s hideout. Then Evan, while hiding in his Harry Potter cloak, just so happens to be right next to where van Sciver calls POTUS on the phone to tell him no dice on the black hawk mission that just went down smack in the middle of LA. Then Evan knows exactly where to walk across the street to find a mortally wounded Freeman in order to kill him. This chapter sealed my Orphan eXodus.

As a professional courtesy, here’s the whole enchilada. Back in 1997 President Bennet authorized the first ever orphan mission when he was in DoD. So he now wants Evan dead because of the potential leverage Evan could go public with. Evan and Joey drive to his old friend Tommy outside of Vegas. This must be prior book stuff because they mention DARPA which the reader should probably remember but we don’t. Evan is planning to eat again to spring some gps trap.  The next chapter opens with Benito and Xavier thanking him and Evan gives the phone number to pay it forward. So, to confirm, there was legitimately zero reason for that entire subplot.  Anyway, Evan and Joey have another cliche conversation about her helping take out van Sciver - no it’s too dangerous 🙄 - he relents and eats a Snickers. Also they somehow know POTUS told van Sciver no more choppers or attack drones on US soil, as they’ve incorporated that fact into their strategy. How convenient!

And now on to the shootout next to Benito’s house. (that was the point of Xavier? His house is next door to a sweet shootout locale?) Anyway Joey sabotages some plank that Thornhill was gonna parkour on to kill Evan. Most others are wiped out leaving only Candy and van Sciver. Evan tells Joey to scram like she promised and tells Tommy to fall back. Candy pursues Tommy while van Sciver takes up position to snipe Evan. Am guessing Joey will save the day and kill van Sciver at last second. This book really disappoints.

Yep. By the damn numbers every step of the way.  At least Joey got shot in the process. Couldn’t have been a more predictable chapter.  (Billy Mays voice:  But wait!  There’s more)

Oh god, Chapter 74. They have a tropic thunder level of cheese conversation. Evan tends to Joey’s leg while van Sciver manages to drive off in his suv despite being moments from bleeding out. Then Candy shows up again. She walks up to Evan, puts her gun to his head, then changes her mind and walks away. Her whole life bent on vengeance for what Evan did to her back and she walked away?

Tommy takes Evan and Joey all the way to Vegas from California despite her needing immediate medical attention??? Then Candy ignores van Sciver’s phone call and keys Evan’s RoamZone number, but doesn’t press call. That sounds like a next book problem.  Ugh, then Evan finds van Sciver at UCLA medical center getting fixed. POTUS couldn’t find something more discreet apparently. Whatever, Evan kills him with an air bubble in his tubes.

In an Epilogue-y way, Joey wakes in a private school in the Alps with a new identity. Evan sends a box of unopened cards to continue where maunty left off.  And Evan uses van Sciver’s phone to call POTUS- aka Dark Road - and let him know he’s coming for him.

Here’s the official review: This book literally got worse with each page.