Book Notices | The Swap by Nancy Boyarsky / Orphan X by Gregg Hurwitz

Nancy Boyarsky, The Swap

Amazon   This book has a promising premise. An American couple, Nicole and Brad, swap houses with a couple from London for the summer, and unpleasantness ensues--Nicole is followed and threatened and soon swept up in an alarming bunch of illegal stuff while her marriage to Brad falls apart. It sounds good, but it just didn't work for me. I didn't care about any of the characters or feel at all excited or interested in what Nicole was getting involved in. And, honestly, I kind of disliked her, in part because she kept ordering expensive food and then finding herself too upset to touch a bite of it. If you're too upset to eat, don't order $100 breakfasts, Nicole! Plus the incident with the vase and the box (sure, order a really expensive vase just to get the packing box, you idiot). The story just wasn't plausible or interesting. By the end, I didn't really care what the explanation for the whole mess was. I just wanted the book to be about a hundred pages shorter.

Gregg Hurwitz, Orphan X

Amazon   Orphan X introduces Evan Smoak, a guy with gadgets and a particular skill set who's using his government-sponsored black ops training to help the helpless, one case at a time. Evan was part of a secret program that turned promising orphans into lethal machines, but that period of Evan's life ended, rather dramatically. Now he's a modern Equalizer, waiting for calls on his secret phone while trying to avoid condo association meetings. I loved pretty much everything about this book. There are two more books out or soon to be out in the series, The Nowhere Man and Hellbent. There's also a short story, Buy a Bullet (but be warned that it is very short: most of what you get for your $1.99 at Amazon is a sample of The Nowhere Man. I wasn't happy about that.)