“That’s the point of dating,” she said. “To, like, get to know someone.”

“The guy’s a communications major—ironic given his lack of verbal acuity—and he barely maintains a two-point oh. Been on academic probation twice. And he had a jaywalking ticket—”

“Uh, you just butchered six dudes in an impound lot.”

“Context is everything.”

Imagine you finished reading a James Bond novel, and felt you’d been made a wiser and better person.

That’s the effect (at least for this reader) of reading Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X series of thrillers. It’s a pretty neat trick, one any author ought to admire.

As you may recall, our hero, Evan Smoak, has lived three lives so far. First he was an orphan in a group home, abandoned and hopeless. Then he was recruited into the government’s super-top-secret Orphan program, becoming a deadly covert assassin. Then, after extricating himself from that life, he became The Nowhere Man, living in a luxury condo in LA, answering calls for help from the desperate, saving them if he can. But as Prodigal Son begins, he’s transitioned to yet another new life. Pardoned through a special deal with no less a personage than the president of the United States, he has given up his vigilante career, and he finds himself untethered in the cosmos. He is a physically fit minimalist with OCD. His human contacts are few. There’s Joey, a 16-year-old girl he rescued from the Orphan project, who does computer hacking for him and has become a sort of surrogate daughter. There’s his neighbor Mia, the single mother of a boy who desperately wants a father figure. There’s real chemistry with Mia, but she works for the DA’s office, and has figured out she doesn’t want to know too much about his life.

Then Evan gets a call over his secure phone, from a woman who claims to be his mother. He refuses to believe it at first, but finally he goes to meet her in Buenos Aires. She wants him to save the life of a man named Andrew Duran, a man who owes money to loan sharks and is working at a city impound lot, trying to make his child support payments. Evan can’t figure out why she cares about this guy, but it’s something he can do for his mother. Of course, that means breaking his deal with the president. And it will put him in the sights of a lethal brother-sister assassin team and the richest man in the world, who has lots of high-tech military-industrial-complex toys.

The stakes keep rising, the twists and turns and setbacks escalate to impossible levels. And yet, the really compelling thing about Prodigal Son is Evan’s personal journey. Meeting his mother after all these years sets him to contemplating what it means to be human, realizing that he has to find some way to connect with humanity. And step by step, he starts doing just that. It’s touching and inspiring – and sometimes funny.

Loved this book, in spite of the slightly preposterous plot (standard in the series) and the cliff-hanger ending (to be fair, all the plot threads had been tied up, so this was more of a cliff appendix). Highly recommended. Cautions for language and violence.