SHELF LIFE
GREGG HURWITZ
The internationally bestselling US thriller writer picks the stone classics that had the greatest impact on his own writing
©Gary Fleder
When I’m writing, I’m trying to create something as beautiful as possible, but the books have to work well, first and foremost, as dark, kick-ass novels that engage the reader entirely. The bar is to write compelling stories that are effective on many levels – like Dickens and Hitchcock and Shakespeare.
My latest, Lone Wolf, is the ninth Orphan X novel, though like the others, it can be read as a stand-alone. My lead character, Evan Smoak, aka Orphan X, was taken out of a foster home at the age of twelve and trained to be an off-the-books assassin for the US government. When we meet him in the novels, he’s gone off the radar, fleeing the program that created him, and he now undertakes pro bono missions on behalf of the truly desperate who have nowhere else to turn.
Lone Wolf has the most personal opening yet. A chance encounter with the man who is his father – a man he’d never known – leaves Evan existentially battered and shaken. Now struggling with this unexpected crisis, Evan goes back to the very basics of his calling. Amusingly enough, this time, the ‘truly desperate’ is a little girl who wants him to find her missing dog.