Into the Fire by Gregg Hurwitz (2020)

In this fifth Orphan X novel, we find our hero attempting something almost as difficult as his previous missions: retirement. After years of pursuing personal redemption by rescuing one random victim at a time from powerful, evil criminals, Evan wants to become something resembling a normal person, with fewer secrets, fewer layers of tradecraft, and perhaps enough emotional openness to sustain actual relationships. Fate (plot contrivance), naturally, has other plans. What begins as a final, relatively simple mission expands in complexity and layers into a multi-book war against a large, distributed criminal empire, transforming Evan's hoped-for exit into another reluctant journey into the high-stakes world he is trying to escape.

I particularly enjoyed the novel's structure: early in the story, Evan is severely injured and progressively deprived of the advantages that normally make him so formidable. Rather than simply overpowering his enemies, Hurwitz makes those progressively higher-level close-combat encounters compelling because Evan's expertise remains intact even as his resources collapse; each successful up-leveling victory therefore feels constructed rather than inevitable. At the "boss level" of the book, Evan must improvise increasingly ingenious MacGyver-style solutions while operating under near-deadly physical constraints. I also enjoyed the emerging side stories and deliberately unresolved mysteries that foreshadow a larger architecture still developing across future books.

For me, the greatest pleasure remains Hurwitz's ability to sustain relentless action without reducing Evan to a formula. The characters remain sharply differentiated, the dialogue is consistently entertaining, and the escalating complications feel like genuine extensions of Evan's increasingly tangled life rather than arbitrary obstacles. Hurwitz keeps finding new ways to put Orphan X in situations for which even Orphan X is insufficiently prepared.

5/5 Stars