“Hero,” Tommy sneered. “Heroes gotta be dead and half forgotten so they can be rewritten by men with weaker chins. There are no heroes. Not me.” His watery blue eyes looked cloudy in the dimness. They gazed unseeingly at Evan. “And not you.”
I announced a little while back that I was giving up on reading thrillers. When I said that I was making a specific mental reservation for a few authors, chief among whom is Gregg Hurwitz. Hurwitz’s Orphan X novels are another matter entirely – because they’re more than high-adrenaline entertainments. They’re brilliantly written and character-intensive. And when I say character, I mean it in two senses.
In Nemesis, our hero, Evan Smoak, the Nowhere Man, freelance hero, is dealing with a terrible personal betrayal. Tommy Stojack, who provides his weapons, is one of very few true friends he has in the world. And in the last book, Evan saw that one of the worst murderers he’d ever encountered was carrying Tommy’s weaponry. Tommy refuses to explain.
For Evan the next step is clear. Tommy is now a danger to the innocent and will have to be eliminated.
Meanwhile, we spend a lot of time with Tommy this time out. We’re used to seeing Evan getting phone calls asking for help, but now Tommy gets one, from a young man named Delmont Hickenlooper, Jr. “Hick” is the son of one of Tommy’s war buddies. Dying in Tommy’s arms, Hick’s father had asked Tommy to look after his boy if he needed help. Tommy can’t refuse that kind of obligation.
He travels to the town of Calvary (I don’t think the state is named, but it’s somewhere in the Deep South), where Hick is holed up in a rundown farmhouse with a group of other young men as shiftless and useless as himself. They imagine themselves some kind of militia, and recently they broke up a group of picknicking Mexican-Americans by driving a Ford truck through the park. Unintentionally, they lost control and killed four people, one of them a little boy.
Meanwhile, Evan tracks Tommy down in Calvary, and once he learns the story of the killings, and observes that the local sheriff seems to be shielding the killers, he adds a new job to his mission – he has to kill these killers too.
At the same time, Tommy is trying – with great frustration – to knock some sense into the young idiots’ heads, in preparation for getting them to surrender to the law.
Which means there must be a showdown between Tommy and Evan.
Also, four of the most feared hired killers in the world are on their way to Calvary too, also intent on killing Tommy.
Nemesis is an almost perfect thriller, as far as I can tell. Every line, every word, does its job with the efficiency of one of Tommy’s precision-tuned semiautomatic pistols. The main characters come vibrantly to life, arousing the reader’s pity and horror.
As always, the Gospel is conspicuous by its absence. The Gospel haunts the story, looming like a human figure against the night sky, discernable by the stars it blocks out.
My only small quibble is that racial relations, which are an important theme here, are rather idealized. For the sake of avoiding too many complications (I assume), all bigotry in this book is limited to white people (who are nonetheless treated with a measure of understanding). There’s a memorable scene where Evan looks through the window of a brightly lit bar, watching a fairly diverse group of people line dancing together, all in rhythm, all in community, and Evan realizes that for all his physical training this is something he can never do.
Anyway, Nemesis is a delicious book to read. Top-shelf entertainment from a master of the form who shows no sign of flagging.
