My Cultural Diet

438 reviews of movies, TV shows, books, restaurants, etc. My own private Goodreads, Letterboxd, and Yelp all rolled into one (more info). Star ratings are 100% subjective, non-scientific, and subject to change. May contain affiliate links, which support Opus.
Lone Wolf by Gregg Hurwitz (Orphan X, Book Nine)

Lone Wolf by Gregg Hurwitz (Orphan X, Book Nine)

The arrival of this one took me by surprise, simply because the previous Orphan X novel — The Last Orphan — seemed to end things on a rather definite note. (That, and it was literally titled The Last Orphan.) Would that it had been the final Orphan X novel. Lone Wolf suffers from the same flaws as its predecessor, namely that it spends so many pages diving into the protagonist’s trauma, existential angst, psychological baggage, and (worst of all) experiences with HOA politics, that it becomes surprisingly and frustratingly inert. After all, this is a series of novels about a super-deadly assassin who now loans out his skills to desperate people in desperate situations while trying to stay one step ahead of the people who trained him. Ironically, the more humanity that it protagonist seems to reclaim, the less interesting he becomes as a character.


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