Stephen Hunter

A collection of reviews originally written for The Washington Post in the 1950s evaluates the B-movies best loved by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author in childhood, a menagerie of spaghetti westerns, monster films, and sci-fi flicks that he watched in a dilapidated midwest theater. Original. 15,000 first printing.

New York Times bestselling author Stephen Hunter takes beloved hero, Earl Swagger, into the lush world of 1950's Cuba to fight the American mobsters who control the Havana casinos. Cuba 1953: The island is on fire. The Mafia-run casinos are rolling, and it's just a 30-minute flight from Miami to a world of vice, gambling, sex, and drugs. The money is there for anyone who knows how to get it, including the Cuban government and the police, who want to keep their ally Uncle Sam happy. There's only one threat to this corrupt utopia: a silver-tongued, daring young revolutionary named Fidel Castro. With the Cold War underway, the Soviet Union has sent a sophisticated veteran agent to find and support the young upstart. To counter, the CIA has summoned Medal of Honor-winning ex-marine Sergeant Earl Swagger, whose heroic exploits have earned him the reputation of a man who doesn't know how to lose. But he's not just going to find Castro... He's going to kill him.

In Cuba, Earl finds himself up to his neck in treacherous ambiguity, where the old rules about honour and duty don't apply, and where Earl's target seems to have more guts and good luck than anyone else in Cuba.

Twenty years after he earned a reputation for killing 87 men during the Vietnam War, Bob Lee Swagger (nicknamed "Bob the Nailer") finds that his skills are in demand when an organization connected with the CIA hires him for a particularly dangerous mission.

Forty years have passed since Bob Swagger's father was gunned down by two robbers just outside Blue Eye, Arkansas. Bob discovers disturbing loose ends in the "open-and-shut case", leading to the men who still wield the power in Blue Eye - men prepared to do anything to keep the past buried.

Pale Horse Coming, featuring Stephen Hunter's beloved sniper heroes Earl and Bob Lee Swagger, the first Swagger thriller from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. The time is 1951. A smooth-talking Chicago lawyer comes to chat with Sam Vincent, the former prosecutor of Polk County, Arkansas, about a dangerous subject--a big prison for violent black convicts near Thebes, Mississippi, up the Yaxahatchee River from Pasagoula. Thebes seems to have dropped out of the Union--letters and phone calls go unanswered, and the lawyer has questions that need answers. Would Sam--an ex-lawman, a white man and a Southerner--agree to go up there and find out what he can? The ex-prosecutor takes on the job, but first he goes to see his old friend Earl Swagger, and tells him that if he isn't back in a week, Earl is to come looking for him. When Sam vanishes into the mists and swamps around Thebes, Mississippi, Earl packs his gun, explains to a distraught Junie that duty is duty and a promise is a promise, and sets off for Thebes, Mississippi to track his friend down. Soon enough, Earl--who approaches Thebes and its sinister prison with the stealth of a good Marine on a recon mission--realizes that something very strange indeed is going on there, that the prison is more than just a place that chills the blood of even the most hardened convict, that in fact the whole town of Thebes is hiding a secret--and it's a place where people disappear all too easily, particularly inquisitive strangers, for whom burial in the swamps follows torture.

Bob "the Nailer" Swagger finds himself back in a warzone situation 25 years after the end of the Vietnam War, but this time the confrontation is in the remote mountains of Idaho. The Russian sniper with whom he duelled in the jungle has tracked him down. But why? Is it revenge or something more?

"Stephen Hunter is in a class by himself. Time to Hunt is as vivid and haunting as a moving target in the crosshairs of a sniper scope."--Nelson Demille, author of Mayday He is the most dangerous man alive. He only wants to live in peace with his family, and forget the war that nearly killed him. . . . It's not going to happen. Stephen Hunter's epic national bestsellers, Point of Impact and Black Light, introduced millions of readers to Bob Lee Swagger, called "Bob the Nailer," a heroic but flawed Vietnam War veteran forced twice to use his skills as a master sniper to defend his life and his honor. Now, in his grandest, most intensely thrilling adventure yet, Bob the Nailer must face his deadliest foe from Vietnam--and his own demons--to save his wife and daughter. During the latter days of the Vietnam War, deep in-country, a young idealistic Marine named Donny Fenn was cut down by a sniper's bullet as he set out on patrol with Swagger, who himself received a grievous wound. Years later Swagger married Donny's widow, Julie, and together they raise their daughter, Nikki, on a ranch in the isolated Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho. Although he struggles with the painful legacy of Vietnam, Swagger's greatest wish--to leave his violent past behind and live quietly with his family--seems to have come true. Then one idyllic day, a man, a woman, and a girl set out from the ranch on horseback. High on a ridge above a mountain pass, a thousand yards distant, a calm, cold-eyed shooter, one of the world's greatest marksmen, peers through a telescopic sight at the three approaching figures. Out of his tortured past, a mortal enemy has once again found Bob the Nailer. Time to Hunt proves anew why so many consider Stephen Hunter to be our best living thriller writer. With a plot that sweeps from the killing fields of Vietnam to the corridors of power in Washington to the shadowy plots of the new world order, Hunter delivers all the complex, stay-up-all-night action his fans demand in a masterful tale of family heartbreak and international intrigue--and shows why, for Bob Lee Swagger, it's once again time to hunt. Praise for Time to Hunt"Stephen Hunter is simply the best writer of action fiction in the world and Time to Hunt proves it."--Phillip Margolin, author of The Burning Man"The best straight-up thriller writer at work today."--Rocky Mountain News

It is the spring of 1945, and the Nazis are eliminating all the witnesses to their horrible crimes, including Jews and foreigners remaining in the prison camps. Kommandant Repp, who is known as a master sniper, decides to hone his sniping abilities by taking a little target practice at the remaining laborers in his own prison camp. But one man escapes and becomes the key to solving the mystery of the cold, calculating Kommandmant Repp and his plans for ending the war.Repp was the master sniper whose deadly talent had come to the notice of British Intelligence as the linchpin of a desperate Nazi plot to reverse the fortunes of the Third Reich at the eleventh hour. But what was the nature of the weapon that Repp was to aim--and who was to be his last target? Allied Intelligence officers Leets, from the U.S., and Outhwaite from England are dispatched to identify and abort his lethal mission. And when they finally learn the truth, the Second World War's deadliest race against time is on.... "Hunter is a deft craftsman with a sure sense of pace and scene. He also knows about irony and sprinkles just a bit over every corpse."--The Washington Post"Mesmerizing suspense..."--Kirkus

A second chance... In the windswept sands of the Middle East, Paul Chardy fought side by side with Ulu Beg: one, a charismatic, high-strung CIA covert warrior, the other a ferocious freedom fighter. Then Chardy fell into the hands of the enemy, and Beg was betrayed. Now the two men are about to meet again. A second gun... Beg has come over the Mexican border under a hail of bullets--determined to assassinate a leading American political figure and avenge his people's betrayal. The CIA wants Chardy to stop the hit. Chardy wants to save Beg's life. Between the two men is a tragic past, a failed mission, and a woman who knew them in war--and who knows their secrets now. Around both men is a conspiracy of lies and violence that reaches back to the Cold War. But as Beg moves in for his kill and as Chardy breaks loose from his handlers, a terrible truth begins to emerge: somewhere, someone wants both men to die.

Only one thing stands between a son and his father's killer: forty years of lies..On a remote Arizona ranch, a man who has known loss, fear, and war weeps for the first time since he was a child. His tears are for the father taken from him four decades before in a deadly shoot-out. And his grief will lead him back to the place where he was born, where his father died, and where a brutal conspiracy is about to explode.For Bob Lee Swagger, the world changed on that hot day in Blue Eye, Arkansas, when two local boys rode armed and wild in a '55 Fairlane convertible. Swagger's father, Earl, a state trooper, was investigating the brutal murder of a young woman that day. By midnight Earl Swagger lay dead in a deserted cornfield.Now Bob Lee wants answers. He wants to know the truth behind the shoot -out that took his father's life, a mystery buried in forty years of lies. Because for Bob Lee Swagger, the killing didn't end that day in Blue Eye, Arkansas. The killing had just begun...Weaving together characters from his national bestsellers Point of Impact and Dirty White Boys, Stephen Hunter's gripping thriller builds to an exhilarating climax--and an explosion of gunfire that blasts open the secrets of two generations.

One of today's premier movie critics takes aim at 13 years of violence on the big screen.

They busted out of McAlester State Penitentiary--three escaped convicts going to ground in a world unprepared for anything like them.... Lamar Pye is prince of the Dirty White Boys. With a lion in his soul, he roars--for he is the meanest, deadliest animal on the loose....Odell is Lamar's cousin, a hulking manchild with unfeeling eyes. He lives for daddy Lamar. Surely he will die for him....Richard's survival hangs on a sketch: a crude drawing of a lion and a half-naked woman. For this Lamar has let Richard live... Armed to the teeth, Lamar and his boys have cut a path of terror across the Southwest, and pushed one good cop into a crisis of honor and conscience. Trooper Bud Pewtie should have died once at Lamar's hands. Now they're about to meet again. And this time, only one of them will walk away....

One of today's premier movie critics takes aim at 13 years of violence on the big screen.

He was one the best Marine snipers in Vietnam. Today, twenty years later, disgruntled hero of an unheroic war, all Bob Lee Swagger wants to be left alone and to leave the killing behind. But with consummate psychological skill, a shadowy military organization seduces Bob into leaving his beloved Arkansas hills for one last mission for his country, unaware until too late that the game is rigged. The assassination plot is executed to perfection -- until Bob Lee Swagger, alleged lone gunman, comes out of the operation alive, the target of a nationwide manhunt, his only allies a woman he just met and a discredited FBI agent. Now Bob Lee Swagger is on the run, using his lethal skills once more -- but this time to track down the men who set him up and to break a dark conspiracy aimed at the very heart of America. "Hunter passes almost everybody else in the thriller-writing trade as if they were standing still... worth every extravagant rave." -- New York Daily News