Nobody's Hero

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.

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What’s Nobody’s Hero About?

A decade ago, Ben Koenig helped a woman disappear—and to do so in a way that even he (who knew more than anyone else in the world about it) wouldn’t be able to track her. But now, she’s surfaced—as someone responsible for a couple of brazen murders on the streets of London. He and his watcher/minder/handler Jen Draper are tasked with finding her and finding out what made her come into the open.

It takes all of their creative approaches to investigating—and Draper’s security firm’s extensive resources—plus a little luck to get on the path. But will they survive it?

Standing in their was is a team of assassins, criminal police officers, smugglers of various stripes, petty criminals—and bigger ones—and schemes that are truly chilling. Their strengths? The aforementioned creativity and extensive resources, some assistance from a certain Agency, their shared drive, Koenig’s lack of fear, his strange humor and odd trivia.

Obviously, the bad guys are in for trouble.

A Daring Move

Far too often when someone/some group in a novel has a completely innovative, genius, unbelievably original idea, it really isn’t. At best they’re usually clever, but nowhere near as mind-blowing as characters act. Too often, I think authors would be better off alluding to a plan without giving us all the details, and readers have to suspend disbelief to keep going.

For a while, I was worried that Craven had bitten off more than he could chew in revealing all that he did—when it was all shadows, I was really invested. But as the book progressed and we got more and more details about the scheme afoot, the more I realized that this was one of those exceptions that proved the rule. There’s some really ingenious stuff going on here.

I should’ve trusted the mind that brought us The Botanist (as only one example).

Can I promise that every reader is going to have their mind boggled by this? No. But even the cynics or the people who suss it out before the reveal are going to admit that this is atypically clever, and you can absolutely understand why Koenig and Draper have such difficulty with this—and are willing to risk so much to stop it.

The Title

I’m not going to get into it now, but I can imagine that more than one book club is going to spend some fun time speculating about/arguing over who the title is referring to.

I mean, I’ve spent some time speculating about it and arguing with myself over the identity. I figure Craven has multiple characters in mind, actually, rather than just one. But I’m prepared to be wrong about that.

Caveat Lector, or, the Fight Scenes

If you’re like me, and decided at one point or another to not have a meal while watching Bones, at least until the (first) body is taken back to the Lab (the CSIs may have driven viewers to a similar choice), you’re going to want to take a similar approach to the fight scenes in this book. That’s actually an excess of caution, you’re really only going to need it for some. But better be safe than sorry—really.

Now, once you put the meatball sub aside, these fight scenes are really well-written. I think they’re better than those in Fearless. Craven brings the goods in the technical sense/ability to depict things clearly, the impact on the plot, and the overall entertainment value.

So, what did I think about Nobody’s Hero?

This is really one of those books best discussed among people who’ve read it—most of the glowing things I want to say would reveal too much—and you don’t have to read too much of Craven’s work to know it’d be a bad idea to cross him. So what can I say?

Let’s start with this—between Fearless and Nobody’s Hero I read a couple of thrillers with a one-man Army in the Reacher/Koenig/Ash/Ryan/Orphan X etc. mold that soured me on the whole thing, so I started this with a little trepidation. Also, I didn’t know how he’d follow up Fearless and feared a little sophomore slump. It took me very little time to cast all that aside and just have a blast with this—I’m back to my appreciation of the genre, and I don’t know if Craven has the word “slump” in his vocabulary.

Ben Koenig is one of those characters that I hope to spend a lot of time with, there’s just something about him that I really like. It was good to see Jen Draper in action and to see the shift in the relationship between these two from where it was in Fearless and the beginning of this book to the end. They’re a good team.

I don’t know where to put this, but I need to say that between what we see in Nobody’s Hero and some of the Poe series, I really have to wonder what kind of drinking establishments Craven frequents (or I hope, for his sake, used to frequent).

One of the assassins has a…let’s put it generously and vaguely…a quirk. It feels like the kind of thing that Craven stumbled upon at some point in the last 15 years and said, “I need to put this in a book some day.” I’m very glad it did—I’m not convinced that a hitman could become a success with that quirk, really. But Craven uses it so well, that I’m not going to complain. I really enjoyed the way it paid off.

We didn’t get a monologue at the end by an evil mastermind, which still happens even after being made a cliché decades ago—it wasn’t necessary, and what we got instead was so entertaining. It was truly a great change from what was expected.

I don’t know that we need that last reveal—nor does the series—but, I look forward to Craven coming back to it in the future (however far away that future may or may not be).

Action, snark, and some really great twists. There’s a momentum to this that builds and builds and builds as the tension ratchets up in a way that shows you’re in the hands of a Thriller Master. Sure, every decent thriller has that characteristic. But anyone who’s read a couple of thrillers knows the difference between standard-issue momentum and tension and something special. This is the latter, and it ain’t even close.

Do you need to read Fearless before this? No. Will it help a little? Not much, but yes. The important thing is that you read both of them. You won’t want to put it down once you pick it up.

Long live Ben Koenig.

Disclaimer: I received this eARC from Flatiron Books via NetGalley in exchange for this post—thanks to both for this.