Incredible, Legendary, Obvious is a thriller novel by Orest Stelmach. It was first published in March 2025 by Penwood. This review is intended to be free of spoilers, but none of us are perfect. Consider yourself warned! A review copy was provided by the publisher. There are affiliate links at the end of this review.
Blurb
WHEN IT ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, HAS TO BE THERE ON TIME – MONEY CALLS HIM.
He’s the courier to the super rich, the most reliable delivery man on Earth. Yet his clients have never met him. They don’t know his name. All they know is he gets the job done, no matter how daunting and dire the circumstances.
Legend has it the Courier has capabilities beyond those of a normal human being. Are the stories true, or just fabrications created to justify his fees?
When a thief steals a package from him, the Courier suffers his first failure. The stakes are enormous – its contents may decide the outcome of a brutal war. The thief is no stranger to him – she’s his former soulmate, a woman long given up for dead. To recover the package, the Courier will use all his skills, and confront a past he longs to forget.
Review
Incredible, Legendary, Obvious follows an unnamed courier who delivers impossibly complex packages for the ultra-rich. He’s earned a reputation for inhuman reliability, until a theft forces him to confront a fragile past in war-torn Ukraine. Things then grow from high-stakes espionage to personal reckonings as he chases both a missing parcel and the memories he thought he’d buried.
The novel is undoubtedly interesting, but it did leave me a little cold. Sure, Stelmach’s portrayal of a courier with memory-absorbing powers adds a fresh twist, though it never quite breaks free from genre conventions. Scenes set in Ukraine offer unexpected emotional weight, but their impact is uneven, sometimes slipping into familiar wartime tropes. The prose is brisk and clear, though fans of lush world-building (and you know that’s my thing) may find the setting underdeveloped.
The Courier himself remains an intriguing mystery, defined more by what he does than who he is. His former soulmate-turned-thief injects genuine tension, yet the novel skimps on deeper chemistry or moral complexity. Secondary figures – oligarchs, handlers, local contacts – serve primarily as plot gears, offering limited emotional resonance.
Stelmach does excel at quick reversals and short chapters that propel the reader forward. Action sequences are tightly choreographed, but quieter moments can feel perfunctory. The blend of wartime flashbacks and modern heists sometimes collides, resulting in tonal whiplash rather than a cohesive atmosphere.
Beneath its slick veneer of espionage and speculative twists, Incredible, Legendary, Obvious quietly asks what it means to carry burdens not of our choosing: the courier’s uncanny memory-absorption becomes a metaphor for the way trauma lodges in our bones, reshaping every step we take. His relentless precision and inhuman reliability feel less like superpowers and more like invulnerable armour against the vulnerability he fears will break him. As flashbacks to war-torn Ukraine intrude on modern heists, the novel suggests that no matter how fast we run from the past, it remains lodged in every parcel we deliver, every promise we make. In this light, Stelmach’s story isn’t just a caper, but a meditation on trust – how easily it fractures, how urgently we need it – and on the fragile alchemy that transforms a package into a lifeline, binding strangers across borders and memories alike.
Incredible, Legendary, Obvious delivers a lean, competent thriller with a few imaginative corners but rarely surprises beyond its central premise. Readers seeking a straightforward caper with touches of speculative flair will find it an easy, if not fully memorable, ride.
Rating: 2/5
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