I liked them all, more or less: the Point of Impact / Dirty White Boys / Black Light Trilogy; the now-dated Cold-war era Countdown to Armageddon "The Day Before Midnight"; and even the weak sister (now there's a Bob Lee Swagger phrase if I've heard one) of the bunch, "The Master Sniper."
Hunter has the mind and the method of the sniper down cold; the author bio mentions Hunter's time in Vietnam, so maybe he is really in the know. In These technical aspects he is unmatched, and his prose is smooth and elegant. He can describe a shooting like no other author I've ever read.
The Problem with "Master Sniper" Is That I just Could not care enough about the story to justify the effort in getting through the book. Do not read on if you are intent on reading the book yourself.
A Legendary SS sniper is loosed by Himmler himself to hunt down and kill a prominent Zionist's son in his Swiss refuge. For a killer who has mowed down two or three hundred Russians in a day's work, this presents no insurmountable moral obstacle, for like all of Hunter's villains and some of his heroes, the sniper kills dispassionately, except for the endorphin storm the act of killing Releases in the killer.
The Hitch Is that our sniper can not be sure which of the twenty-odd kids holed up in the Swiss Alpine Convent is the right one. No matter; with his cumbersome but deadly infrared night scope he'll take them all out in pitch darkness. The development of this early infrared sight is a major plot thread, and is some of the most interesting reading of the book.
No kid, no inheritance, no fortune to be channeled to postwar Zionist causes. Even better, Himmler figures he'll Appropriate the money for the SS and use it to help ex-SS men escape the Allies' Nuremberg noose: ODESSA gets a pay raise. A potentially interesting hook, but it if flat here in Hunter's telling.
His adversary is a downtrodden American OSS firearms expert, with a shot-up leg and a romance gone bad. I found it very hard to like or admire this Leets, alternating between lovesick puppy and man of steely resolve; and I failed to see how shooting the kid would really stop the Zionists' progress. Maybe my brain has been cooked in my skull by the glare and heat at poolside, but I never quite figured why the kid had to die so did the SS Could get his inheritance. And I never grew fond enough of Leets to really care if he succeeded in stopping our Nazi. I found myself rooting for the sniper much of the time since he is the book's most exciting actor.
In summary, the book is filled with tight, tactile, multisensory prose but the storyline itself just did not reel me in like Those of Hunter's other works. If you start with "The Master Sniper", give Hunter another chance before you write him off your summer reading list. Better to start with "Point of Impact" and tag along with Bob Lee Swagger for a while. Lotsa shooting without all the angst.
