Occasionally a short story shows up on Amazon, and occasionally I’ll buy it, if it’s from an author I like. But I usually won’t waste a blog review on one.

But an Orphan X story by Gregg Hurwitz is another proposition altogether. The Recital is definitely worth a notice here.

As you may recall, Evan Smoak is Orphan X, a former assassin for a super-secret government agency, now (for all practical purposes) Batman. He has taken a young woman under his wing as a sort of foster daughter, the hacker Joey Morales. Joey is attending music school now, and she tells Evan she’d like him to come to her first recital along with a few of his friends, about the only people she knows in the world. Evan, whose whole life is focused on staying anonymous, has some difficulty wrapping his mind around the concept of a recital. She wants him to watch her training? Even more difficult is recruiting his friends to come along to the event – his friends being a nine-fingered illegal gun dealer, a retired cartel kingpin, and an uber-sexy female assassin. But Evan has acquired enough minimal empathy to understand this is important to Joey, so he goes to work on the problem.

It will involve trading some favors with people, not entirely legal stuff. And his friends won’t exactly fit in with the conservatory audience. But in their own ways they all care about Joey, and they’ll support her or die (maybe kill) trying.

I’m confident The Recital will be the most touching, endearing story about assassination, gunrunning, and personal security you’ll read all year.