During the course of Gregg Hurwitz’s terrific Orphan X series, we have seen Evan Smoak go from being a government black ops assassin to a lone wolf now calling himself the Nowhere Man. He and his unique skill set are on full display once again in this latest effort.

ANTIHERO begins with Evan unwittingly coming to the aid of 15-year-old Lesandro Candella, who had part of his left arm and one finger from his right hand cleaved off by a machete. The offending party was a group of five vicious gang members who had mistaken him for a rival. As Evan leaps from his Ford F-150 to tend to Lesandro, he phones 911, requesting medical attention for the victim and police to claim the five bodies that will be at the scene. He then proceeds to dismantle the gang members without having his pulse rate raise one beat. That is simply what the Nowhere Man does.

"ANTIHERO is a wild ride to the dark side of human nature with a lone avenger who long ago gave up his soul and now only knows how to live by his own moral code."

Evan then receives a call from one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, Luke Devine, for whom he has done work in the past. Devine has a young lady freaking out in his bedroom after a wild party at his house, and he does not know how to process the situation. Evan flies out with his protégé, Josephine “Joey” Morales, to deal with this and keep Devine’s reputation intact, even though he never laid a hand on her.

While on the east coast, Evan gets wind of the kidnapping of a woman from a New York City subway car. Anca was subject to seizures that made her black out, so she carried information around her neck on how to treat her. Unfortunately, the wrong people found her. Evan is put onto this case by Monica, the paranoid woman in Devine’s bed. She had to leave Anca behind to meet up with Devine and realized that some dangerous men had taken her.

With the assistance of master hacker Joey, Evan locates the victim's Bronx apartment. Her full name is Anca Dumitrescu, and she works with the local Romanian church. She is slow to coming around to having a guardian angel by her side. But once she accepts Evan's help, along with the support of fellow Orphan X member Candy McClure, her only request is that he not kill anyone.

Our antihero takes supreme pleasure in enacting revenge against those members of society who cannot comply with the acceptable standards set for them. Evan begins with the seedy character who runs the illegal streaming site that depicts young women being abused in all sorts of hideous ways, including a download featuring the unfortunate night that Anca spent with her captors. He then meets up with each of the young men who took Anca from the subway to rape and abuse her in the backroom of a strip joint and firmly enjoys doing everything but killing them out of respect for Anca. His quest takes him coast to coast, and it is both rewarding and shocking to witness him taking down deplorable excuses for human beings.

ANTIHERO is a wild ride to the dark side of human nature with a lone avenger who long ago gave up his soul and now only knows how to live by his own moral code. Hurwitz has infused Evan Smoak with complexity that most readers still will not be able to grasp and simply must bear witness to his solitary mission that gets increasingly bleaker with each new installment of the series.