Format: 416 pages, Hardcover
Release Date: February 10, 2026
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thriller, Suspense
In the latest in this New York Times best-selling series, Evan Smoak takes on his most complex mission yet—one where he has to find a way to balance vengeance with mercy.
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 meet Luke. 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 tracking down 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.
When Luke Devine, one of the most powerful men in the world, has a psychological crisis, Evan flies to the East Coast to meet Luke. 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 tracking down 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.
Antihero is the 11th installment in author Gregg Hurwitz's Orphan X series. In this latest thriller, Evan Smoak—once the government's black-ops assassin known as Orphan X, now operating as the shadowy "Nowhere Man"—takes on what may be his most morally complex mission to date. The story begins with Anca Dumitrescu, a Romanian-American with a condition that causes her to have two seizures a day. She wears a sign around her neck to ask for help in public, giving care instructions and asking her good Samaritans to stay with her until she wakes.
She asks a young girl for help as she goes into a seizure, but her possible savior leaves the subway just as four predatory young men enter. This leads Evan, accompanied by Joey, to Luke Devine, one of the world's most powerful (and unstable) figures, during a severe psychological crisis. A man whom he was previously sent to kill, but he let him live. What begins as a rescue operation evolves into a quest for justice and vengeance against those responsible, forcing Evan to confront difficult questions about mercy, punishment, and the line between heroism and vigilantism. Anca wants justice, but not the justice that Evan tends to mete out when someone crosses the line.
Evan also makes an effort to reach an understanding with Naomi Templeton, who has tried hard to bring Evan in for the things he's done in the past. Still reeling from the events and the major loss of a friend in the previous book (Nemesis), he grapples with grief, self-doubt, and the challenge of evolving beyond his assassin instincts. Key supporting characters like Joey add layers of tension and heart—Evan's protective instincts clash with his need to let those he cares about step into danger—while new figures like Anca and Devine bring fresh emotional weight and nuance.
There are some other curiosities as well, namely Mia Hall and Candy McClure's relationship with Evan. When you try to diagnose the dynamics, you have to step back and marvel at how many curious women Evan has in his life, including Joey and Naomi. The pacing is relentless, starting with a gripping, violent opener and building through coast-to-coast chases that span gritty urban underbellies and elite corridors of power. Plus, the author adds a few side missions to handle, which means Evan has a plate full of things to deal with.
It seems as though after every book in this series, I ask the same question. How much more can Evan take? He's lost one of his best friends, and he's walking a tightrope between being caught by federal law enforcement and helping people who need it badly, like Anca and several others. Plus, at one point in this book, Evan ponders all the people he has helped throughout the series, which makes me curious about how many more books will be written in this series. The dynamics between Evan and Candy are an interesting idea, as is the recurring relationship with Mia Hall.
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1All Fight. No Flight.
Shiny penny-sized blood drops on the white tile floor of the East Los Angeles bodega reflect back the sterile fluorescent lights above. In the immediate wake of the violence, the bodega is deserted, aside from the clerk who clutches his chest with one hand and covers his mouth with the other. His ancient sun-beaten skin is paper thin, and he is frail, bones tenting the fabric of his off-brand polo. He has seen a lot of violence in his day. But nothing like this.
A finger, cleanly sliced off, has landed on the cloudy plastic mat beside the cash register. An arm, severed just below the elbow, rests on the floor a short distance from the checkout counter. The wrist, grotesquely, still wears a retro Pac-Man watch. The clerk is incapable of tearing his gaze away.
A display of Hostess desserts is knocked over from the post-ambush struggle, Ho Hos, Twinkies, and Sno Balls strewn across the spattered floor. Ghostly crimson footprints choreograph the struggle where five grown men attacked Lesandro, a fifteen-year-old boy they had mistaken for a rival gang member.
The revelation of Lesandro’s mistaken identity came only after half of his limb was cleaved from his body in a single hack. In an instant the boy had been transformed from mistaken target to innocent to witness capable of testifying against his five attackers, his own disfigurement ensuring the hit on him had to proceed. In the momentary confusion, Lesandro had managed—barely—to flee.
A bloody handprint mars the glass of the single automatic door, which bangs open and shut against Lesandro’s shed Air Jordan, which lies trapped in the threshold. Night air blows through in sporadic puffs, tasting of car exhaust, oil, carne asada on a distant grill.
If you ease through the oscillating gap into the chill black night, you can follow various footprints for a half block until the red fades away. After that, a convenient trail of dribbled blood continues to mark the way. You might catch up, if not to Lesandro, panting and wild-eyed, then at least to the five men in pursuit of him.
A half block behind him but closing the gap, they wear wifebeaters or white T-shirts with blocks of blue, red, and green. They wear headbands or backward baseball caps with flat brims. They wear expressions of teeth-bared malice and flecks of blood on their cheeks.
You might not believe there is a gang as vicious as MS-13, but that speaks only to the limits of your imagination. The decades-old Trinitarios were birthed in Rikers Island to protect Dominican inmates from the Salvadorans, Latin Kings, Bloods, and other predators feeding inside the lethal prison ecosystem. Their weapons of choice are machetes because, they are fond of saying, a gun runs out of bullets but a blade never does. Torture and murder, home invasions and drug running, they do it all. So vicious are they that the gang itself splinters and those splinters splinter until they are a rageful disintegration of packs turning on themselves, maiming and killing indiscriminately.
An East Coast gang, they have recently spread to make inroads on the left coast, a murderous manifest destiny. These five Trinitarios are at the forefront, franchise openers for East L.A.
Right now they are picking up steam.
Lesandro is losing steam. Understandably so.
His sock flops from his shoeless foot. He stumbles and weaves along the sidewalk, occasional passersby darting to safety in doorways or sprinting across the street. His face is pale, lips dry and cracked, flaked with cotton in the corners. Now he can hear the footfall behind him, quickening.
Cupping his stump, he bolts up a narrow and dark side road, the streetlights flickering or shot out overhead. On either side of the potholed stretch of asphalt loom long-abandoned places of business—a graffiti-covered mechanic shop, a shut-down textile-processing plant, a low-income housing unit scorched through with arsonist’s fire. Jagged mouths of window openings sip in the night. Discarded furniture rises from dumpsters.
As Lesandro casts a frantic glance over his shoulder, he staggers into a parking meter, which knocks him across the curb and into the street.
A truck bears down.
Not just any truck.
A discreet-armored Ford F-150.
Behind the wheel sits a shadowed form of a man, ordinary of size and bearing.
The truck halts abruptly, veering sharply to barely avoiding finishing what the Trinitarios started in the bodega.
Lesandro slams into the passenger-side door of the truck. Internally lined with bullet-resistant Kevlar, it does not dent. He takes a few wobbly steps up onto the curb and leans against a rough brick wall beside a blown-out window. Breath heaves from him.
His pursuers near, backlit. Their shadows pull high up the dilapidated buildings, a convoy of ghouls. If you squint, you might make out the silhouettes of machetes at their sides, dancing along the wall.
Lesandro is a sweet boy with Gauguin eyes and a broad, pleasing nose. He sags against the brick rise, his face tilted down. He is drooling. At his side, wind sucks through the broken pane, a wail that underscores his own labored breathing.
The men rush forward, closing in on Lesandro.
The truck’s passenger door flies open, catching the first in line squarely.
He body-slams into the door, his nose meeting the laminated armor glass of the window. The glass does not crack, but one cheek and two ribs do. The man emits not so much a grunt as an ejection of air, and collapses onto the street. Inside the truck, the dark form in the driver’s seat leans over once again, and the door pulls shut above the unconscious body.
The other four men halt in the darkness of the street, weapons dangling at their sides, breath huffing in the February air. Three of the men wield machetes. One holds instead a slender steel pipe. Silence befalls the street.
The driver’s door opens.
An Original S.W.A.T. tactical boot sets down onto the street.
The man emerges.
He is known by different names—Orphan X, the Nowhere Man, Evan Smoak.
He removes a rugged-looking phone from his pocket and dials three numbers, gazing calmly at the men. “Yes, hello. Please send ambulances and PD to this location. I’ll text decimal coordinates now. There are six injured parties.”
The Trinitarios look at him, more perplexed than angry, their heads tilted in comical unison.
“Yes, six,” Orphan X continues. “The most acute is a young man with a severed left arm and a finger missing from his right hand. The wound has just been stabilized and I’ve started fluids. The arm is likely gone but please bring a waterproof bag and ice container for the finger in case it can be located.”
“Hey,” one of the gangsters says. And then, louder, “Hey!”
Orphan X holds up a just-a-sec finger to him, listening to the question over the phone. “The other injuries? Those have yet to be ascertained.”
On the ground by the passenger door, the fallen man releases a moan of pain before falling unconscious again.
“Rapa tu mai,” one of his cohorts hisses at Orphan X through irregular gold teeth.
“Depending on how this goes,” Orphan X says into the phone, “you may want to send a hearse as well.”
He hangs up. Frowns at the screen. Thumbs once. A bloop sound effect confirms the conveyance of coordinates to 911.
Casually, he circles the back of his truck, passing within feet of the poleaxed gang members as he walks over to Lesandro. Blood drools from the stump through the thumb and remaining three fingers of the boy’s good hand. His teeth chatter.
Orphan X takes the boy gently by the shoulders and slides him down the wall to sit. A breeze whines across the broken glass of the pane to their side. A weathered mural of a young mother and her younger girl remains faded on the brick near them, dates bookending too-short lives, a memorial for the Trinitarios’ last innocent bystanders.
Lesandro’s teeth chatter some more. “My watch,” he says. “I c-can’t find my watch.”
Crouching over him, Orphan X says, “It’s okay. We’ll get it soon enough.”
“Yo,” one of the attackers says, stepping forward. “What the fuck, mamagüevo? You know where you are right now?”
The machete tap-tap-taps the outside of his thigh.
Orphan X turns to appraise the man in full. His white T-shirt looks useful.
Orphan X’s left hand blurs and a Strider folding knife lifts from his pocket, snapped open by the very gesture. The machete has no chance to lift from the man’s side before Orphan X steps forward and punches the knife into the intercostal space between the man’s second and third ribs. Air hisses out as the lung collapses.
Orphan X push-kicks him in the hip, spinning him around, grabbing a fistful of shirt at the back collar, and whipping the Strider upward to rake through the fabric.
Shiny penny-sized blood drops on the white tile floor of the East Los Angeles bodega reflect back the sterile fluorescent lights above. In the immediate wake of the violence, the bodega is deserted, aside from the clerk who clutches his chest with one hand and covers his mouth with the other. His ancient sun-beaten skin is paper thin, and he is frail, bones tenting the fabric of his off-brand polo. He has seen a lot of violence in his day. But nothing like this.
A finger, cleanly sliced off, has landed on the cloudy plastic mat beside the cash register. An arm, severed just below the elbow, rests on the floor a short distance from the checkout counter. The wrist, grotesquely, still wears a retro Pac-Man watch. The clerk is incapable of tearing his gaze away.
A display of Hostess desserts is knocked over from the post-ambush struggle, Ho Hos, Twinkies, and Sno Balls strewn across the spattered floor. Ghostly crimson footprints choreograph the struggle where five grown men attacked Lesandro, a fifteen-year-old boy they had mistaken for a rival gang member.
The revelation of Lesandro’s mistaken identity came only after half of his limb was cleaved from his body in a single hack. In an instant the boy had been transformed from mistaken target to innocent to witness capable of testifying against his five attackers, his own disfigurement ensuring the hit on him had to proceed. In the momentary confusion, Lesandro had managed—barely—to flee.
A bloody handprint mars the glass of the single automatic door, which bangs open and shut against Lesandro’s shed Air Jordan, which lies trapped in the threshold. Night air blows through in sporadic puffs, tasting of car exhaust, oil, carne asada on a distant grill.
If you ease through the oscillating gap into the chill black night, you can follow various footprints for a half block until the red fades away. After that, a convenient trail of dribbled blood continues to mark the way. You might catch up, if not to Lesandro, panting and wild-eyed, then at least to the five men in pursuit of him.
A half block behind him but closing the gap, they wear wifebeaters or white T-shirts with blocks of blue, red, and green. They wear headbands or backward baseball caps with flat brims. They wear expressions of teeth-bared malice and flecks of blood on their cheeks.
You might not believe there is a gang as vicious as MS-13, but that speaks only to the limits of your imagination. The decades-old Trinitarios were birthed in Rikers Island to protect Dominican inmates from the Salvadorans, Latin Kings, Bloods, and other predators feeding inside the lethal prison ecosystem. Their weapons of choice are machetes because, they are fond of saying, a gun runs out of bullets but a blade never does. Torture and murder, home invasions and drug running, they do it all. So vicious are they that the gang itself splinters and those splinters splinter until they are a rageful disintegration of packs turning on themselves, maiming and killing indiscriminately.
An East Coast gang, they have recently spread to make inroads on the left coast, a murderous manifest destiny. These five Trinitarios are at the forefront, franchise openers for East L.A.
Right now they are picking up steam.
Lesandro is losing steam. Understandably so.
His sock flops from his shoeless foot. He stumbles and weaves along the sidewalk, occasional passersby darting to safety in doorways or sprinting across the street. His face is pale, lips dry and cracked, flaked with cotton in the corners. Now he can hear the footfall behind him, quickening.
Cupping his stump, he bolts up a narrow and dark side road, the streetlights flickering or shot out overhead. On either side of the potholed stretch of asphalt loom long-abandoned places of business—a graffiti-covered mechanic shop, a shut-down textile-processing plant, a low-income housing unit scorched through with arsonist’s fire. Jagged mouths of window openings sip in the night. Discarded furniture rises from dumpsters.
As Lesandro casts a frantic glance over his shoulder, he staggers into a parking meter, which knocks him across the curb and into the street.
A truck bears down.
Not just any truck.
A discreet-armored Ford F-150.
Behind the wheel sits a shadowed form of a man, ordinary of size and bearing.
The truck halts abruptly, veering sharply to barely avoiding finishing what the Trinitarios started in the bodega.
Lesandro slams into the passenger-side door of the truck. Internally lined with bullet-resistant Kevlar, it does not dent. He takes a few wobbly steps up onto the curb and leans against a rough brick wall beside a blown-out window. Breath heaves from him.
His pursuers near, backlit. Their shadows pull high up the dilapidated buildings, a convoy of ghouls. If you squint, you might make out the silhouettes of machetes at their sides, dancing along the wall.
Lesandro is a sweet boy with Gauguin eyes and a broad, pleasing nose. He sags against the brick rise, his face tilted down. He is drooling. At his side, wind sucks through the broken pane, a wail that underscores his own labored breathing.
The men rush forward, closing in on Lesandro.
The truck’s passenger door flies open, catching the first in line squarely.
He body-slams into the door, his nose meeting the laminated armor glass of the window. The glass does not crack, but one cheek and two ribs do. The man emits not so much a grunt as an ejection of air, and collapses onto the street. Inside the truck, the dark form in the driver’s seat leans over once again, and the door pulls shut above the unconscious body.
The other four men halt in the darkness of the street, weapons dangling at their sides, breath huffing in the February air. Three of the men wield machetes. One holds instead a slender steel pipe. Silence befalls the street.
The driver’s door opens.
An Original S.W.A.T. tactical boot sets down onto the street.
The man emerges.
He is known by different names—Orphan X, the Nowhere Man, Evan Smoak.
He removes a rugged-looking phone from his pocket and dials three numbers, gazing calmly at the men. “Yes, hello. Please send ambulances and PD to this location. I’ll text decimal coordinates now. There are six injured parties.”
The Trinitarios look at him, more perplexed than angry, their heads tilted in comical unison.
“Yes, six,” Orphan X continues. “The most acute is a young man with a severed left arm and a finger missing from his right hand. The wound has just been stabilized and I’ve started fluids. The arm is likely gone but please bring a waterproof bag and ice container for the finger in case it can be located.”
“Hey,” one of the gangsters says. And then, louder, “Hey!”
Orphan X holds up a just-a-sec finger to him, listening to the question over the phone. “The other injuries? Those have yet to be ascertained.”
On the ground by the passenger door, the fallen man releases a moan of pain before falling unconscious again.
“Rapa tu mai,” one of his cohorts hisses at Orphan X through irregular gold teeth.
“Depending on how this goes,” Orphan X says into the phone, “you may want to send a hearse as well.”
He hangs up. Frowns at the screen. Thumbs once. A bloop sound effect confirms the conveyance of coordinates to 911.
Casually, he circles the back of his truck, passing within feet of the poleaxed gang members as he walks over to Lesandro. Blood drools from the stump through the thumb and remaining three fingers of the boy’s good hand. His teeth chatter.
Orphan X takes the boy gently by the shoulders and slides him down the wall to sit. A breeze whines across the broken glass of the pane to their side. A weathered mural of a young mother and her younger girl remains faded on the brick near them, dates bookending too-short lives, a memorial for the Trinitarios’ last innocent bystanders.
Lesandro’s teeth chatter some more. “My watch,” he says. “I c-can’t find my watch.”
Crouching over him, Orphan X says, “It’s okay. We’ll get it soon enough.”
“Yo,” one of the attackers says, stepping forward. “What the fuck, mamagüevo? You know where you are right now?”
The machete tap-tap-taps the outside of his thigh.
Orphan X turns to appraise the man in full. His white T-shirt looks useful.
Orphan X’s left hand blurs and a Strider folding knife lifts from his pocket, snapped open by the very gesture. The machete has no chance to lift from the man’s side before Orphan X steps forward and punches the knife into the intercostal space between the man’s second and third ribs. Air hisses out as the lung collapses.
Orphan X push-kicks him in the hip, spinning him around, grabbing a fistful of shirt at the back collar, and whipping the Strider upward to rake through the fabric.
