Marilyn's Mystery Reads

For want of sixty-five dollars, Andrew Duran became witness to a murder, a man fleeing for his life.  For sixty-five dollars.

All he wanted was to buy a present for his daughter to make up for the lousy father he’d been.  Then, a few weeks later after he’d given her the gift, a cop pulled him over because he was driving with a broken taillight.   He couldn’t pay the court costs, and the sixty-five dollars spiraled into jail time and a lost job.

Now Duran is working the overnight shift at a car impound lot when a man and a woman enter the lot, telling him they’re U. S. Marshals and need to be informed when a certain car is picked up.  That’s all he has to do, and they’ll give him a thousand dollars.  He’s desperate, so he agrees.

However, Duran senses that something is wrong, so he is not entirely surprised a few weeks later that as the car’s owner enters the lot, he is killed.  Not by a knife or gun, but by something invisible controlled by the man and woman, standing a few feet away from their victim.  And now the killers/fake Marshals are searching for him.

Enter Evan Smoak, a/k/a The Nowhere Man.  An orphan, or so he was led to believe, he was rescued at the age of twelve from the Pride House Group Home and trained by the federal government to be an assassin.  After years of doing exactly that, he left the program and has been using his skills to help those in desperate need who don’t have anywhere else to turn.  He called himself The Nowhere Man, asking those he helped for only one thing–to give his name and phone number to someone else who needs his assistance.

Now even that identity is over as a result of his killing a Very Important Person.  In order to receive a pardon for that act, Evan has promised no less a person than the President of the United States that The Nowhere Man will cease to exist.  But Evan is finding that it’s not that easy to construct a new identity, especially when he receives a phone call from a woman purporting to be his mother.

All the threads come together when Evan flies to Buenos Aires to meet her, a beautiful, enigmatic woman with a mysterious past.  She tells Evan about herself, all of which is new to him, then she reveals the reason she’s contacted him after all these years.  And although he’s promised himself, to say nothing of his promise to the president, that he’s done with being The Nowhere Man, he finds he cannot turn down his mother’s request.

The Prodigal Son shows the reader a different Evan Smoak from the one in previous novels.  He’s more introspective, more thoughtful, more compassionate.  After a lifetime of being Orphan X, these changes don’t come easily.  If he wasn’t happy as Orphan X or The Nowhere Man, at least he knew who he was and what was expected of him.  But now he’s feeling unsure, vulnerable, and he’s not certain how to handle it.

The protagonist in Prodigal Son is a fascinating character with nuances that weren’t apparent in earlier novels.  These make him more relatable, more human, and even more real to us.  Gregg Hurwitz has given his hero new dimensions.

You can read more about Gregg Hurwitz at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.