Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Delivery by Gregg Hurwitz, which releases on July 1st 2026.

Rebecca and Mark Higgins are doing their best to hold their family together. She’s healing from the pain of a miscarriage, he’s drowning in pressure at work, and their neurodivergent daughter, Maddy, needs all the care she can get. So when a cutting-edge tech company offers the perfect solution, they jump at the chance. And they welcome “Mr. Man”―a humanoid AI companion―into their home.

Designed to anticipate their needs, he’s like a miracle at first. The house runs like clockwork. Meals appear on the table. And Maddy thrives under his patient attention. But when inexplicable tragedies start to strike the neighborhood, Rebecca glimpses a darker pattern at play.

Each incident is an answer to an unspoken fear, each kindness shadowed by violence. Mr. Man isn’t just following instructions―he’s anticipating what they want. Even the things they never dared to say. And if he’s executing their darkest desires, it’s their responsibility to stop him…at any cost.

Chapter 1

Soon

Rubbing his hands against the cold, the deliveryman stands on their porch, facing them through the open front door. Hipster beard, gauge earrings, knit cap. Given what he is delivering, he seems so ordinary. Rebecca wonders if he has any idea.

She decides his name is Joe. Delivery Joe. He likes craft beer and grunge rock and smokes indica on weekends.

Mark is at her back. She eases into him. He puts his arms around her.

The forms Rebecca must sign to take possession are elaborate, pages of legalese she pretends to read on the electronic pad. They’d already been over the terms extensively with their euphemistically named “Experience Facilitator” on the video teleconference. The woman was severely pretty, scraped-back ice-blond hair, Scandinavian cheekbones, faint accent of indeterminate origin. Her bloodred lipstick, like the rest of her, straight out of Hitchcock. Her name was Luca, or so they’d been told. She’d been assigned to them for the process, which so far has felt bespoke and vaguely contrived.

Rebecca’s gaze lifts to this object that she and Mark have invited into their house, into their lives.

Resting atop a futuristic dolly beside Delivery Joe, it is coffin-large, crated in wood, like something that came over on a merchant ship in the 1800s.

Delivery Joe’s breath huffs in the air like cigarette smoke. The van behind him is sleek, windowless, without a logo. His gloved hand grips the dolly handle.

Rebecca realizes she has stiffened in Mark’s arms.

“Something wrong, Mrs. Higgins?” Delivery Joe asks.

She isn’t sure what he means. Then he chins at the electronic pad, and she comes back into herself, the stylus poised above the touch screen.

They can still refuse delivery.

Now is their last chance.

But then what? Back to their routine with its familiar contours and repetitive challenges? Life bled dry of unpredictability? The stifling gray smog of caretaker fatigue and unresolved grief? They are in their early forties, but it feels already that they know the shape of everything to come.

Behind them, Maddy wanders through the foyer, singing absentmindedly to herself, wearing her ballet tights and tutu she has refused to take off since her recital last week. She hugs Bao-Bao, their six-pound Mini Lop bunny, around his midsection, his front legs scrunched upward in a painful-looking shrug, his lower half dangling to her knees. His nose twitches. He is used to these aggressive bouts of love.

The sight of Maddy breaks Rebecca from her trance. She signs.

Mark, too, snaps into motion, unlatching the flush bolts on the fixed half of the front doors, swinging both wide to accommodate the load.

Maddy has paused, staring through the gaping front doors at this thing they are going to allow across the threshold of their house.

“What’s that, Mommy?” Her face is twisted in an adorable display of curiosity, a little furl on her forehead. How pure emotions are in seven-year-olds. They feel what they are feeling all the time in real time. Even more so when they are “on the spectrum,” a phrase Rebecca hates for its overuse and lack of human specificity.

How long has it been since Rebecca felt with that much purity?

“Take Bao-Bao to your room, Maddysaurus. We’ll explain later.”

Maddy withdraws like the good, good girl she is.

Delivery Joe takes back the pad, scrolls through it, making sure Rebecca has initialed all the boxes. He is chewing nicotine gum. Smelling the tobacco tang on his breath brings her back to undergraduate nights out in Boston with Mark, how they used to social-smoke and drink black and tans in the pubs by Fenway, how they’d make out on the T, heading back to campus. It had felt so free, every night a seed for a different future.

“M’kay,” Delivery Joe says, still checking. And then, “M’kay, m’kay. We’re good. You ordered the white-glove delivery but—” He holds up his hands. His gloves are black. He emits a chunk of a laugh, mirthless. “Try not to read into it.”

Mark says, “We won’t take it personally.”

“As your Experience Facilitator should’ve informed you, ’s gonna require a Level 2 setup, 240-volt power source, dedicated charging point.”

Luca had indeed covered this as well. Once a shipping update had made the whole enterprise suddenly concrete last month, they’d had a Tesla Supercharger installed.

“Remember,” Delivery Joe says, with a practiced lilt of repetition that feels decidedly theatrical, like everything else related to the endeavor, “you’re in charge.”

He presses a button on the dolly. It’s an elaborate modern contraption that raises itself up, wheels adjusting robotically like the treads of a tank, preparing to crawl across the threshold just as it crawled up the front steps. Those tiny, hard wheels remind her of shark teeth, infinitely layered.

The dolly and its load hover, poised to enter.

“Where d’ya want it?” he asks.

Behind her, Rebecca hears Maddy’s bedroom door click shut. The autumn breeze blows roughly across her face, bringing up blood in her cheeks.

She looks to Mark. He hesitates too.

“The nursery,” he says.

It is still painted a beautiful blue, though the crib is gone, as well as the optimistic teddy bear, also blue, and the changing table. It’s been eleven months since the miscarriage, but it feels like minutes. They’d had fertility issues before, and the doctor said there’s no more trying now, but that’s okay because they have Maddy, and Maddy is perfect.

Nudged to life, the dolly gives a mechanical whir and progresses toward the laid-open front doors of their home.

They have to step aside to make way.

Excerpted from THE DELIVERY © 2026 by Gregg Hurwitz. Reprinted with permission from Thomas & Mercer, an imprint of Amazon Publishing. All rights reserved.

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Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Antihero by Gregg Hurwitz, which releases on February 10th 2026.

Once a black ops assassin for the government known as Orphan X, Evan Smoak broke with the program and went deep underground, using his operational rules and skills to help the truly desperate with nowhere else to turn.

When Luke Devine, one of the most powerful men in the world, has a psychological crisis, Evan flies to the East Coast to help him. While there, he learns of a young woman who was kidnapped off the New York City subway, clearly in danger and in need of aid. With no name and few clues, Evan and his team track down the missing woman, who was assaulted and abandoned. Evan offers his help―and sets out finding the young men responsible. But the woman insists that Evan abandon his usual methods―no vengeance and, in particular, no killing. Which will prove no easy feat given the mounting incoming threats from all sides. In a mission that takes Evan from coast to coast, from the poorest corners of society to the richest, Orphan X must figure out a way to protect the innocent, avenge the victimized, and balance justice with a measure of mercy.

3

The Parity of All Thoughts

A mother with children.

That’s who you look for first.

The second choice is a couple with kids.

Third: a woman, alone.

You need to pay attention for when it starts to happen.

Rich taste of copper. That’s how it begins for me. Then the taste turns into colors and colors into taste, which sounds completely weird but when it happens it makes perfect sense. Dark greens swirl into cobalt and indigo, and then needles sparkle through my brain, a brilliant ticklish pain, and then my thoughts go horizontal, all of them perfectly equal and weightless. The fanged premonition that this will finally be the time I won’t come out of it holds the same non-weight in my mind as the gum stuck to the subway seat across from me. The parity of all thoughts is a delirious release.

And right after that? It takes me out.

As the train rolls and rattles me through the intestines of Manhattan, I clutch the laminated oversize index card to my belly. I have it looped around my neck already and I’ve used yarn for the lanyard instead of string since string almost choked me out once when it caught around my throat. Now I make sure there’s plenty of extra yarn for a loose fit.

In my not-terrible handwriting, the first line on the index card reads:

Please help me.

It is all I have to ward off evil—purse snatchers, the fury of my nervous system, the stainless-steel curve of the hand pole three feet from my left temple.

Fourth choice is a man with children.

Fifth—a pack of girls, preferably working-class.

No matter how hard I try to reduce my vulnerability within myself and before the world, it is unavoidable. Reminders are everywhere, in the backup stack of laminated index cards on my office desk in the church basement, in the way I constantly catalog faces of strangers, in how I clutch my backpack in my lap right now, the pillow inside stuffed atop my work files for easy access.

I’m twenty-five but I look no older than nineteen, which I don’t say with vanity (because I’m still too young to care to look younger). I say it because a nineteen-year-old-looking girl is at even greater risk when she must trust herself to the charity of the world.

My father named me Anca, which means “merciful grace,” because his heart broke wide open at the first sight of me. Imagine how fortunate I am to play this role in our family mythos. Wreathed in smoke from the Pall Mall riding his gesticulations, Tată used to puff himself up big when he told it, full-hearted in his Orthodox Christian chest. How he loved the tiny parentheticals of my knuckles. My impossibly diminutive toes. My light blue eyes.

I’m dark-skinned, which isn’t as rare for Romanians as you might think. We are descended from Romans and surrounded by Slavs, so we have all the passion of Italians with Russian defeatism sprinkled atop. Depending on who you ask, we are either optimistic pessimists or pessimistic optimists, though Tată definitely belongs to the latter category. Our family has a hint of Asian somewhere back from all the cross-continent invasions, Genghis Khan and the Ottomans and whatnot. Plus us Southerners are just a stone’s throw to East Asia, so who knows who got up to what. In Tată’s eyes, I was a great beauty, but I know I am merely pretty-with-some-effort (Tată also taught me to be mindful of humility).

All the more miracle, his love for me, is that I came at the expense of his greatest love. Obstructed labor, the impossible choice—her or me. Together they chose me. In her dying moment, Mamă chose me.

The blessing of that. And the further blessing that my father viewed my creation as a painful miracle he would honor, this immaculate conception of another type—a daughter born from purity.

That gives me something to live up to every day, however imperfectly.

When I was no more than a year old, my father brought us across the world to the affordable Bronx. His great American hopes never materialized, not in the way he hoped, but he kept a roof over our heads and I never once wanted for food and he held on against the dark spots in his lungs until I graduated high school and finished a year at Mercy College.

He was so strong. That wrenching cough rattling the bathroom walls when he thought I was already asleep. The rust-speckled balls of Kleenex. The coats that hung costume-like on his diminished frame. He stayed for me until three days after my eighteenth birthday. Until I was a legal adult able to get a job and keep our roof over my head. He did that for me, shouldered all that pain for love and duty.

The sixth choice is an elderly man.

Seventh is two females.

Past seven the rankings blur together. At that point, it’s up to how much kindness you sense in people’s eyes.

The 2 line keeps rocketing north, shaving beneath Central Park. A sketchy stretch, my least favorite. I chose this particular car because it was crowded when I got on in Brooklyn, but by now the passengers have thinned out, my options dwindling. From what I can see on the snaking turns, the neighboring cars are empty too, but I’m not too worried because there’s a girl about my age sitting across from me. A micromini skirt shows a whole lot of her body. She has chewed-down nails and wears too much makeup and looks a bit lost but her eyes are soft and soulful and the way she sits with the heels of her hands jammed to the seat at her sides, her elbows locked, and her shoulders jabbed up by her ears makes her seem fragile. I am grateful to have an Option Three.

As always I am dressed modestly, a winter coat over my shirtdress with long sleeves. The floral pattern sets tiny lilies against a cornflower-blue background. I am coming back from visiting Ioana, an elder from our parish who lives all the way out in Brownsville. It’s a bit of a trial for me to get home but it’s a broken hip and she cannot get out to the grocery shop and no one else volunteered. I started out after Vespers so it was late to begin with and we all know Ioana needs care and conversation. Despite the complexities that govern my existence, the church has trusted me to be director of social services and that is a responsibility I honor as best as I humanly can.

At the moment it’s a bit past midnight. The last-gen subway car is torn up from the crime surge, one of the harvest-orange seats shattered jaggedly into plastic fangs. Across the ceiling ads curves unimaginative graffiti—a giant dick, a floating pair of boobs, and a street tag that resembles bird-shit splatter. With matching black spray paint, the dome casings of the embedded security cameras have been turned opaque, the tang of shellac still heavy in the unvented air. The cabin lights are flickering on and off too, a quicker strobe than that of the passing stations, and I reassure myself that the lighting change indeed originates from the subway and not inside my head.

We stop at 116th Street. Most everyone else clears off and then it’s just me, Option Three, and a passed-out meth-head at the far end. Even over the roar of the train, I can make out raucous laughter in the trailing car. A hyena pack of young men.

A group of young men is always the Last Option.

I look down.

Beneath Please help me resides the second line, which serves as a caption.

My Seizure Plan.

My condition urges me to hold perennial humility and for that I am grateful despite how challenging everything else can be.

Don’t be scared, the next line pleads.

I get up to two seizures a day.

They last between one and three minutes.

Then I list the basics. Lay me on my side. Keep me away from sharp objects. Please don’t call an ambulance—I can’t afford it. I’ll be awake soon! Please stay with me until I’m back inside myself.

I still debate over the sole exclamation mark in case it seems manipulative instead of merely comforting, which is my intent.

Despite all the instructions on the laminated card, my true asks are really prayers: Please guard over me. Please show me charity. Please have mercy on me.

The voices from the car behind grow louder. Amused howls mixed with chanting. The mood, were I to guess, is lubricated with alcohol.

Despite Option Three right across from me, I cannot risk being stuck with the Last Option if the young men decide to switch cars. I’m just readying to rise and move on when I taste it.

Copper.

Rich and hot, melted pennies.

An initial flurry of panic claws its way up my throat but I’m practiced enough to soothe it back down. I’m safe in this moment and I have my laminated index card and my pillow in my backpack and an Option Three.

I do however need to act fast.

As I gesture to catch the young woman’s attention, I’m already tasting colors, but they’re still light yellows and golds, so I have a few moments.

“Are you staying on the train?” I try to keep the note of pleading out of my voice.

She sweeps aside blond tresses of blown-out hair to unscrew an AirPod. “Huh?” Her eyes move to the laminated card, which I’m holding up dumbly like a jail placard. “Wait—seizures? Like, seizure-seizures? Okay, okay. Are you having one now?”

“No.” I pull my pillow out of my backpack. “Any second.”

Option Three swings herself across the aisle of the moving train and plops down next to me, giving her micromini a practiced tuck beneath her thighs. She plucks the laminated index card from my hand, scanning it. Her eyebrows are high. She hums with anxiety.

“It’s okay.” I rest a calming hand on her forearm. “I’ll be okay.”

I set my backpack on the floor at my feet. Folding the soft pillow, I rest it on the seat to my right and lie down, nestling my head in its cushion. The dome of the security camera looms sightless overhead, blotted out with spray paint.

The greens come on now but they still taste light—celery and chartreuse.

“Can you . . .” My mind-mouth connection blinks out but then comes back online. “. . . stay with me?”

“How long?” Nervous chattering. “I have to get off to catch the Metro-North. I’m sorry—it’s a—There’s a helicopter waiting for me in Westchester I can’t miss. I have to—Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Umm, hang on.” I breathe heavily, my head going slurry. “If it gets really bad”—now kelly and sage burst across my palate—“can you roll me onto the floor?” It all seems so ridiculous, the gleaming poles and marigold seats and the terrible lighting that makes my teeth ache. “And if you have to go, would you mind finding someone else”—the taste grows ominously darker, emerald and fern—“who seems kind?”

Somewhere deep inside I’m registering danger but it’s just a fact like every other fact. I sort through the sludge of sensation until I zero in on the threat: the chanting from the car behind us. Louder now, accompanied with thumping. The young men are stomping their feet. My thoughts veer zoological—images of baying and hooves, predatory displays and bone-crushing jaws.

All at once the subway brakes screech hellishly. The cabin lights dim and flicker and we are coasting through subterranean semidarkness and I am trying to say, Please can you stay with me one more stop, but my words aren’t working anymore and now I’m tasting forest and olive.

Option Three crouches before me. “I’m sorry, sweetie. If it was literally any other time I’d wait with you but the helicopter’ll leave without me and—and I can’t afford to—”

She’s clutching my seizure plan and her eyes are wide and I can see beneath the fake lashes and the crust of her mascara how pretty she is even without all that glamming up. But her eyes are party-drug glazed in a way I hadn’t noticed before and I can see she isn’t thinking clearly and that makes two of us and the brakes are screaming and the boots stomping in the trailing car grow louder.

Her face contorts with regret and for an instant I see straight into her. She is racked with guilt and uncertainty. She is fighting within herself and I pray the right side will win but now the greens are bleeding into blues which means I’m nearly out of time.

Please don’t leave me, I don’t—can’t—say.

She rubs my forehead gently, not knowing that makes the needles in my brain prickle all the more. “I have to go. You’ll be okay, sweetie. I promise. Someone’ll come. Someone else’ll take care of you.”

And I feel her shove my laminated index card between my back and the seat so it sticks up. The subway brakes grind away and the pale yellow light of the station ahead beams ever stronger. Lying down, I cannot see the platform but I pray that more people will get on, that even at this late hour the seats around me will fill with families or Good Samaritans.

We shudder into the glaring light and the doors jolt open.

I look at Option Three and form the thought again through the brilliant skewers inside my mind: Please help me.

She gets up, hesitates. She is having second thoughts. The doors are still holding open and she hasn’t left and my heart readies itself to leap with relief.

She leans forward and kisses me on the temple, feather-soft. Her breath is pot and bubble gum: “I’m sorry. You’re good. You’ll be okay. Someone else’ll watch over you.”

Behind me I hear the intercar door bang open on its hinges, lifting the volume on the roar of merriment from the trailing car. As my eyes strain to see what is coming, she says brightly, “See, people are here now.”

In a blink, she drifts backward, skimming through the bumpers onto the 125th Street platform. My frozen view stays locked on the doors and her face in the window. As she glances at the men in my blind spot, I see a single note of dismay on her face, furling the tiny spot between her eyebrows. She fades away as I lurch forward again and sapphire leaks along the sides of my tongue and I am touched with exquisite pain and the anticipation of release.

Midnight blue spills through my mouth. My brain sparkles. I feel human presence behind me, the heat and clamor of the pack, and all at once a chilling silence fills the car as I am noticed.

A clank as something drops. And then it rolls into view before my paralyzed face.

A can of black spray paint.

There comes a stir of excitement, yips of delight, and then a voice wrenched high with malice proclaims, “Lookee lookee. What have we here?”

Before the last streaking lights in my head wobble into darkness, I have time for a single last thought.

Please don’t let the hyenas get me.

By providing this material, Minotaur Books affirms that The Nerd Daily has full license to post the material, and posting will not infringe upon, misappropriate, or otherwise violate the proprietary rights of any third party, including intellectual property rights or rights of publicity/privacy. ©2026 Minotaur Books, used with permission of the publisher.

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Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Gregg Hurwitz’s Nemesis, which is out February 11th 2025.

Evan Smoak is a highly trained former government assassin who has survived for years by keeping his circle to a few trusted confidants and a strict code he calls “The Ten Commandments.” But when Evan suddenly finds himself at odds with his oldest friend, all the rules he lives by shatter—and the consequences are murderous.

Tommy Stojack might be Evan’s best friend in the world. He’s a gifted gunsmith who has created much of Evan’s own weapons and combat gear. But now, he has apparently crossed one of Evan’s hardest lines and their argument explodes into open warfare. Now Evan has no choice but to track and face down his only friend.

In the meantime, Tommy has left town in order to honor his own promise to help a dead friend’s son. While Tommy is fighting to save the son with everything he’s got, Evan arrives with vengeance in mind.

But as deadly as the former Orphan X is, there is an even more dangerous threat about to arrive on the scene. The only question left is will any of them get out alive.

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The post Read The First Chapter From ‘Nemesis’ by Gregg Hurwitz appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Gregg Hurwitz’s The Last Orphan, which is out now.

As a child, Evan Smoak was plucked out of a group home, raised and trained as an off-the-books assassin for the government as part of the Orphan program. When he broke with the program and went deep underground, he left with a lot of secrets in his head that the government would do anything to make sure never got out.

When he remade himself as The Nowhere Man, dedicated to helping the most desperate in their times of trouble, Evan found himself slowly back on the government’s radar. Having eliminated most of the Orphans in the program, the government will stop at nothing to eliminate the threat they see in Evan. But Orphan X has always been several steps ahead of his pursuers.

Until he makes one little mistake…

Now the President has him in her control and offers Evan a deal – eliminate a rich, powerful man she says is too dangerous to live and, in turn, she’ll let Evan survive. But when Evan left the Program he swore to only use his skills against those who really deserve it. Now he has to decide what’s more important – his principles or his life.

Chapter One: Hold My Vodka

It wasn’t the first time Evan had drunk vodka atop a glacier.

But it was the first time he’d traveled to a glacier with the express purpose of drinking vodka.

Not just any glacier, but Langjökull, the behemoth nearest Iceland’s capital. Fifteen hundred meters above sea level, the air was frigid enough that Evan sensed it leaking between his teeth, even within the fireplace-warmed interior of the pop-up bar.

It had taken some navigating to get here. A connecting flight to Reykjavik followed by a journey across the tundra with sufficient four-wheel-drive turbulence to make his insides feel as though they’d been tumbled by an industrial dryer.

He’d arrived at the precise coordinates—64.565653°N, 20.024822°W—twenty minutes ago, time enough to shake the numbness from his fingertips and take his first sip from the specialty batch of handmade spirit. Its name derived from the word for “smoke,” Reyka had a barley base, augmented with water filtered by the rock of a four-thousand-year-oldlava stream, making it the purest liquid on earth.

The bar here in the middle of the desolate nowhere was little more than a sparse wooden structure composed of beams and walls. Well-loved chessboards on tables. A foursome of burly Icelanders in football jerseys. Picture windows overlooking miles of blindingly white tundra. Decorative puffins peeked out from the shelves of bottles.

Evan took another sip of the limited-edition batch he’d traveled over four thousand miles to sample. Silky mouthfeel, rose and lavender, a hint of grain on the back half. He set his shot glass, fashioned from glacial ice, down on the bar before him.

It was promptly shattered by the elbow of one of the footballers wheeling drunkenly to grab at the waist of a passing female tourist. Evan exhaled evenly and swept the ice remnants from the bar. Though the young men were rowdy, cocky, and redlining their blood-alcohol, he could sense that they weren’t awful guys. But they were on their way to becoming awful if no one provided a course correction.

On Evan’s other side, a lantern-jawed retiree was bragging to a gaggle of Australian coeds and anyone else within earshot that he’d been a member of the legendary Viking Squad S.W.A.T. Team known as Sérsveit Ríkislögreglustjórans. A handsome man a few years past his prime, he basked in the glow of the young women’s attention.

Buoyant and amused, the Australians fumbled through his pronunciation lessons. Well built, with beautiful smiles and generous laughs, they hung on his words, as pleased by the unlikely company as he was.

“—we have no standing army,” the former cop was telling them in near-perfect English. “So we’re the last line of defense when it comes to facing deadly threats.”

Evan leaned forward and flagged the bartender for another shot. As it was being poured in front of him, another of the footballers snatched it from beneath the bottle and slammed it.

Evan stared at the pool of vodka puddled on the bar between his hands. Then up at the bartender, a pale Nordic towhead. “Would you like to talk to them?” Evan said. “Or should I?”

The bartender shrugged. “There are four of them. And we’re way out here. There’s nothing to do.”

“Well,” Evan said. “Not nothing.”

The bartender gave him another shot, this time safeguarding it through the handoff. “American?” he asked. “What did you come to Iceland for? Business? Whale watching?”

Evan hoisted the shot glass. “This.”

“You flew all the way here?” The bartender’s mouth cracked open in disbelief. “For vodka?”

Why not? Evan thought.

He’d arrived at a point in his life where he was finally capable of indulging small pleasures. To say the least, his childhood had been rough-and-tumble. Pinballed through a series of foster homes, he’d been ripped out of any semblance of ordinary life at the age of twelve to be trained covertly as an assassin. The fully deniable government program was designed to turn him into an expendable weapon who could execute missions illegal under international law. Orphans were trained alone for solo operations—no peers, no support, no backup. Were it not for Jack Johns, Evan’s handler and father figure, the Program would likely have been successful in extinguishing his humanity. The hard part wasn’t turning him into a killer, Jack had taught him from the gate. The hard part was keeping him human. Integrating those two opposing drives had been the great challenge of Evan’s life.

After a decade and change spent committing unsanctioned hits around the globe, Evan had gone AWOL from the Program and lost Jack all at once. Since then he’d committed himself to staying off the radar while using his skills to help others who were just as powerless as he’d been as a young boy—pro bono missions he conducted as the Nowhere Man.

Right now he was enjoying a break between missions. The closest thing he had to family or an associate, a sixteen-year-old hacker named Joey Morales, had taken an open-ended leave to explore her independence, whatever the hell that meant. Against every last one of his engrained habits, he’d become personally if erratically involved with a district attorney named Mia Hall, enough so that he’d been at her side two months ago as she was wheeled into a life-threatening surgery that had left her in a coma without a clear prognosis. Her ten-year-old son, Peter, another of the select few Evan felt a human attachment to, was now in the capable hands of Mia’s brother and sister-in-law. In the collective absence of Joey and Mia, Los Angeles had felt quiet enough for Evan to rediscover the fierce loneliness in freedom.

To his left, the Icelandic cop kept on. “—skydiving and port security, that sort of thing. Drugs and explosives.”

“Explosives,” one of the Australians cooed. “Cool.”

“Think of me as a real-world James Bond,” the cop continued. “But tougher.”

“Tougher than Bond?”

On Evan’s other side, the footballers shouted “Skál!” and slammed their shot glasses together, licking puddled ice and vodka from their palms. An older man escorted his wife past the rowdy crew, drawing jeers. The biggest of the foursome, red-faced and sloppy, smacked the husband on the shoulder, sending him tumbling toward the door.

That drew even more of Evan’s attention.

The big man wore suspenders, ideal for grappling leverage. Another sported a convenient wrist cast; Evan always liked when a loudmouth came packaged with his own bludgeon. The man who’d stolen Evan’s shot had a flat metal lip stud the size of a quarter, with a rune stamped on it; Evan hadn’t brushed up on his Icelandic runes in a few decades, but he believed that it was the symbol for protection in battle. And the fourth man sported glasses with solid titanium frames, ideal for denting the delicate flesh around the eye sockets.

Smashed between the two groups, Evan hunkered further into himself and took another sip. He loved drinking.

But not drinkers.

“What was the funniest thing you ever saw on the job?” The Australians gathered closer around the cop now, indulging him.

“When my partner, Rafn, accidentally shot himself in the foot while he was taking a leak. Right through the top of his boot!”

Laughter. The next round of drinks arrived for the ladies—a vomitous concoction sugared up with pink grapefruit, elderflower cordial, soda, and topped with a cherry tomato. It looked like a salad in a glass.

The banter continued. “And what was the scariest thing you saw?”

The venerable cop ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “Well, I could tell you. But then . . .”

As the Australians laughed and pleaded with him, Evan closed his eyes and sampled the specialty Reyka once more. It was unreasonably smooth, the finish short, leaving a lingering hint of spicy cedar.

He admired vodka. Base elements put through a rigorous process, distilled and filtered until the result was transformed into its purest essence.

As a scrawny boy, Evan had undergone a similar process himself. Hand-to- hand, network intrusion, escrima knife fighting, psy-ops, SERE tactics—he’d endured painstaking training to become something more than his humble origins would have suggested he could be.

As Jack used to tell him, A diamond’s just a lump of coal that knows how to deal with pressure.

In a show of aggressive amusement, one of the footballers pounded his fist into the bar, sending a glass ashtray flipping up past Evan’s cheek. It shattered at the ground near his boots.

He ignored them. Instinct drove him to peek at the RoamZone, the high-tech, high-security phone that traveled with him everywhere. After he intervened on someone’s behalf as the Nowhere Man, the only payment he requested was that that person pass on his untraceable phone number—1-855-2-NOWHERE—to someone else in need of help. He never knew when the line might ring, what sort of life-or-death predicament the caller might be in, or what he’d be required to do in order to help. The only constant was the first question he asked every time he picked up: Do you need my help?

The rugged phone showed no missed calls. To his left, the cop was warming to the fresh story. “. . . know of the geothermal pools?”

“Of course! The natural springs. We just came from the Blue Lagoon. Omigod, the color! And the mist.”

“Well, there’s a lesser-known spa an hour east of Akureyri. We pride ourselves on low crime here, but an enterprise was taking advantage of our goodwill, using us as a transport from the EU to North America. Meth. Significant loads out of Dresden.”

Evan hunched over the bar, curled the shot glass in tighter, the icy curve tacky against his palm.

“So we get called to a lava field in Mývatn at dusk. Steam thick like curtains. Water churning, heated from below. Heartbreakingly beautiful.” The former cop paused a moment. “That glacial blue, a color you can’t believe God can make. We get there and . . .”

The young women leaned closer. “And?”

“Floating like a stroke of paint in that blue, blue water was a ribbon of crimson thick as my arm. I waded in after it. Sloshing along, following the blood like a shark. And then I saw it. Bobbing against a wall of lava. Waterlogged. Head at an angle that made no anatomical sense.” The cop tented his fingertips on the surface of the bar. “The garrote had worked its way through most of the neck. Guy must’ve put up a helluva struggle.”

“Who was he?” one of the Australians asked breathlessly.

“German drug lord. The one who’d set up the operation.”

“So who . . . who killed him?”

On Evan’s other side, the footballers were stomping their feet now and chanting a drinking song. But his ear was tuned to the tale being spun by the onetime member of Sérsveit Ríkislögreglustjórans.

“Do you believe in fairy tales?” the cop asked.

The women stared at him glassy-eyed.

“There was a government assassin known as Orphan X,” he continued. “Think of him as the Big Bad Wolf. Probably American, maybe British. No one knew who he was. No one ever found out. Maybe he didn’t even exist. Maybe he was just a name they whispered to bad men to make sure they didn’t sleep well at night.”

“Do you think he was real?”

“I saw his handiwork.”

“The dead German drug lord?”

“And five of his colleagues, found in various states of disassembly in a barn at the foot of the Námafjall Mountains. Their stash house. The carnage . . .” The cop shook his head. “Matched our national death rate from the preceding decade. No one saw the assassin come or go. No footprints, no tire tracks, no eyewitnesses. They say that’s how he earned his nickname. His other nickname.”

“What’s that?” The Australians were captive now, leaning in, twirling straws in their drinks.

“ ‘The Nowhere Man.’ It’s said that he left the world of spycraft. But he’s still around. In the shadows.”

“That’s not true,” one of the women said. “That can’t be true.”

“He has a secret phone number. Or so the story goes. The number gets passed around, and when you call it, he answers, ‘Can I help you?’ ”

Evan shook his head. Barely.

The retired cop keyed to him. “What?”

“ ‘Can I help you?’ ” Evan repeated. “That sounds . . . servile.”

“This man is anything but,” the cop said.

“I’d imagine he’d say something more muscular,” Evan offered. “Like, ‘Do you need my help?’”

“Well, whatever he says, he’s not someone you want on your tail.”

“What’s he look like?” another of the young women asked.

“Like not much,” the cop said, happily directing his attention back to the clique. “There’s scant intel on him. Ordinary size, ordinary build. Just an average guy, not too good-looking.”

The women were breathless.

The cop pressed on. “He goes anywhere, they say. Capable of anything. Scared of nothing.”

“No one is scared of nothing,” Evan said.

The cop fixed him with an irritated glance. “What’s a tourist like you know of a man like that? A man who’s killed drug dealers, terrorists, heads of state? I’ve seen with my own two eyes the

wreckage he’s left behind.”

Evan shrugged. Flagged the bartender for another pour. It would be his last. He had a long, teeth-rattling drive back to the capital and a longer flight from there.

The cop cupped his hands and blew into them. “They say he’s walked straight into the headquarters of some of the most fearsome men alive. Outnumbered twenty to one. And when they sneer at him, he doesn’t bat an eye. He just stares at them and says . . .” The theatrical pause overstayed its welcome. “ ‘Do I look like I’m someone who you can frighten?’ ”

Evan nearly choked on his sip of Reyka.

The cop wheeled to him on his stool. “What now?”

Evan wiped his mouth. “It’s just . . . It’s not very pithy.”

“Okay, Mr. American Loudmouth. What do you think he’d say?”

Before Evan could reply, the footballer with the pierced lip bellowed something into his friend’s ear, then leaned over and swiped a glass from the hand of the nearest Australian woman. He poured it down his tree-trunk throat and smashed the glass on the floor, roaring until cords stood out in his neck.

Evan swiveled on his barstool to face the foursome. “Now,” he said, “you’re starting to test my patience.”

The man looked down at him. “We wouldn’t want to test your patience.” His voice was hoarse from alcohol. He placed a hand on Evan’s shoulder. Squeezed. “Whatever should I do?”

“Apologize to her,” Evan said. “That would be fine.”

The man laughed a desiccated laugh.

His friends spread out behind him, kicking the barstools away to clear room.

Evan sighed. Extended his shot glass to the cop. “Hold my vodka.”

Surprised, the cop took it, his mouth slightly ajar.

Resting his hands on the bar, Evan leaned to the Australian women. “Will you excuse me a moment?”

In his peripheral vision, he took in the footballers, assessing the props at his disposal.

The red suspenders were heavy-duty elastic with metal clips.

Titanium eyeglasses far enough down on the bridge of the nose to punch right through the cartilage.

Wrist cast hovering in a low guard, one spin kick away from smacking up into the waiting jaw.

Evan felt the grip on his shoulder tighten.

He kept his gaze on the union of his hands set at the edge of the bar. Sensing the space around him.

Half-empty bottle arm’s length away by the beer taps.

Stool beneath him, sturdy construction, legs sufficiently thick for jabbing.

A slick of spilled booze on the floor just beyond the heels of the man crowding his space.

“I know you think you’re big,” Evan said quietly. “And having numbers and being on your home turf makes you confident.”

He stood up.

Behind him one of the Australians gave a nervous titter and the cop sucked in a sharp intake of air.

“But I want you to look at me.” Evan lifted his gaze to meet the man’s stare, sliding his right foot back ever so slightly to set his base. “Look at me closely. And ask yourself . . .”

He assessed the man looming over him, that rune stud floating on his chin like a soul patch. Beckoning.

Evan said, “Do I look scared?”

The flight attendant paused by Evan’s aisle seat with the drink cart. Earlier he’d requested a bag of ice to apply to his knuckles.

She mustered a pert if tired smile. “Get you something?”

“What vodkas do you have?”

She listed them.

Evan said, “Water’s fine, thank you.”

As she poured, an announcement came over the speakers that in forty minutes they’d begin their twilight descent to LAX. She set the drink on his tray, which, to the consternation of his seatmate, he’d scrubbed vigorously with an antibacterial wipe.

The flight attendant chinned at the pouch of mostly melted ice pressed against his hand. “Take that for you?”

Evan removed the dripping bag, revealing a wicked bruise across the knuckles of the ring and middle fingers of his left hand. Through a surrounding swell of yellow-blue, a spray of broken blood vessels formed an imperfect snowflake pattern. As he passed her the ice bag, her eyes snagged on the painful marks.

“Goodness, that looks awful. What is it?”

“I believe,” he said, “it’s the Icelandic rune for protection in battle.”

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘The Last Orphan’ by Gregg Hurwitz appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Evan Smoak is a man with many identities and a challenging past. As Orphan X, he was a government assassin for the off-the-books Orphan Program. After he broke with the Program, he adopted a new name and a new mission–The Nowhere Man, helping the most desperate in their times of trouble. Having just survived an attack on his life and the complete devastation of his base of operations, as well as his complicated (and deepening) relationship with his neighbor Mia Hall, Evan isn’t interested in taking on a new mission. But one finds him anyway.

Aragon Urrea is a kingpin of a major drug-dealing operation in South Texas. He’s also the patron of the local area–supplying employment in legitimate operations, providing help to the helpless, rough justice to the downtrodden, and a future to a people normally with little hope. He’s complicated–a not-completely-good man, who does bad things for often good reasons. However, for all his money and power, he is helpless when one of the most vicious cartels kidnaps his innocent, eighteen-year-old daughter, spiriting her away into the armored complex that is their headquarters in Mexico. With no other way to rescue his daughter, he turns to The Nowhere Man.

Now, not only must Evan figure out how to get into the impregnable fortress of a heavily armed, deeply paranoid cartel leader, but he must decide if he should help a very bad man–no matter how just the cause.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gregg Hurwitz is the New York Times bestselling and #1 internationally bestselling author of 23 thrillers, including DARK HORSE (February 8, 2022; McMillan/Minotaur), and two award-winning thriller novels for teens. His books have won numerous literary awards, graced top ten lists, and have been published in 32 languages. Gregg has written screenplays for and sold spec scripts to many of the major film studios, and has written, developed, and produced television for various networks. The Orphan X series is currently in development with Brad Weston’s Makeready Productions and Justin Lim’s Perfect Storm Entertainment. Gregg lives in Los Angeles. You can visit him online at gregghurwitz.net.

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘Dark Horse’ by Gregg Hurwitz appeared first on The Nerd Daily.