Published by Minotaur Books on February 10, 2025
Having defeated the program that made Evan Smoak into a killing machine before his creators tried to kill him, Evan now helps the helpless. At some point in Antihero, a teenage girl who sent a revealing selfie to a jerk calls Evan for help because the jerk is threatening to post the selfie for her peers to see unless she gives him more. Reporting the blackmail scheme to the police would be a civilized approach to the jerk’s behavior, but Evan decides the jerk should be frightened into better behavior. At least the jerk survives the encounter, unlike some of the criminals Evan confronts.
Antihero opens with a one-against-five street fight that allows Evan to prove his tough guy bona fides to the reader. Having established Evan’s tough guy credentials, Gregg Hurwitz dives into the primary plot thread. Anca Dumitrescu, a 25-year-old employee of a Romanian Orthodox Church in the Bronx, suffers from daily seizures. When she feels a seizure coming on, Anca implores a bystander (chosen in order of probable decency) to watch over her for a few minutes until she recovers.
Anca has a seizure on the subway. She tries to get help from the only available passenger — a woman named Monica — but Monica wants to catch a helicopter and can’t take time to stay with Anca. As Monica leaves the subway, she notices four young men approaching Anca and knows that can’t be good.
The helicopter takes Monica to a powerful man named Luke Devine — the kind of man who knows everything about everyone of importance, in part because he has them all under electronic surveillance. Devine intended to shag Monica but she’s too upset, so he calls Evan — an odd choice, since Evan’s ability to deal with upset women is negligible. When Monica tells Evan about Anca, Evan has his sidekick, Josephine Morales, use her computer skills, combined with Devine’s surveillance network, to search for her.
By the time Evan finds the apartment where Anca was gang-raped by the four men, Anca has made it home. Evan decides to track down the rapists by confronting the guy who rented them the room, but after discovering that they filmed the rape, he decides to go after the purveyors of violent porn. The relatively straightforward story follows Evan as (with the help of Devine’s wealth and gadgetry) he takes on the porn industry and the various bad actors who cross his path.
Hurwitz writes strong action scenes, but the story he tells in Antihero is nothing special. Violent gang members and rapists and purveyors of violent porn are the kind of easy targets that readers of tough guy novels are accustomed to encountering. The fast pace and exciting action scenes would be enough to earn a recommendation despite the superficial plot, but I’m giving a strong recommendation to Antihero because its characterization moves beyond the superficial.
Like a lot of tough guy protagonists, Evan is fairly quick to judge people and to kill the ones who, in his judgment, deserve to die. If they don’t deserve to die but, in his judgment, deserve harsh punishment, Evan administers pain and inflicts injuries in the precise degrees that, in his judgment, the evildoers deserve. Too rarely do tough guy protagonists consider the morality of their actions or the societal consequences of allowing tough guys to supplant the criminal justice system in meeting out punishment. Authors of tough guy novels avoid those hard questions by removing ambiguity about the villain’s evil nature, assuring the reader’s sympathy for victims of the villain’s misdeeds. Readers can easily greet the absence of due process with a shrug that signals “he deserved it.”
In Antihero, Hurwitz forces Evan to at least contemplate the possibility that he has no right to torture or execute people. Anca — one of the best characters Hurwitz has created — is informed by her religion. She admonishes Evan not to kill the men who raped and filmed her because she believes that judgment comes from a higher power, not from tough guys. It isn’t rare for victims to feel this way — many people have opposed the death penalty for defendants who murdered their family members — but it’s rare for thriller writers to acknowledge moral complexity.
I give credit to Hurwitz for introducing a victim who has the courage to tell Evan that she refuses to allow him to kill in her name. Mind you, Evan still busts up the characters in Antihero he regards as evil (he seals one in a giant plastic bag), but Evan is at least influenced by the argument that it isn’t his business to seek vengeance for a victim who doesn’t believe in vengeance. Realizing that he might be turning into a monster, Evan gives more thought to the morality of vengeance than is common for an action hero tough guy. The Nowhere Man doesn’t quite grow a conscience by the novel’s end, but he forces himself to acknowledge the potential validity of Anca’s perspective.
Hurwitz also shapes the evolution of Evan’s character by forcing him to confront his fear that Josephine, when no longer under his wing, will endure the kind of pain and harm that he sees in the victims he helps. Evan isn’t Joey’s father, but he is facing the hard choices that parents make between protecting their kids from harm and being so overprotective that they deny their kids the opportunity to become independent. Hurwitz’s deft handling of Even’s character development earns a stronger recommendation than I might otherwise give Antihero.
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