Point of Impact
by Stephen Hunter
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Book Reviews of Point of Impact
Book Review: "Bob the Nailer" makes great reading
Summary: 5 Stars
Bob Lee Swaggart, USMC retired, projects the cold calmness of a hard man, and if you sensed this about him, you'd be correct. "Bob the nailer," as he was known during his three tours in Nam, is one of the darkest of American heros, a sniper with 87 confirmed kills.
Bob's career ended in '72 when he received a near fatal wound from an enemy sniper working at extreme range - the same incident in which Bob's spotter Donny Fenn was killed. Now, in the 1990's, Bob lives in the tiny town of Blue Eye, deep in the Ouachita hills of Arkansas. He still loves the hunt but no longer kills. He uses Delrin bullets which only stun the prey, usually mature bucks whose antlers he then cuts off, rendering the animal useless as a trophy and ensuring its long life.
Enter twisted shrink Dobbler, Colonel Shreck and his henchman Jack Payne of the Ramdyne Corporation. They have a sinister plan, and Bob Lee Swaggart is the perfect fit. The question facing them is simple: how to find a trophy Bob Lee will hunt.
How about the Russian sniper who killed the man's spotter and ended his career?
Bob Lee is drawn in, allowed to fire a priceless rifle and prove he still has the skill. Slowly, Colonel Shreck reveals his true motive; there's a conspiracy to kill the president. The shot will be from more than fourteen hundred yards, an unheard of distance, and, the Russian will be the shooter. Only Bob Lee has the skills to figure out where and when it will happen.
Bob Lee signs on, only to watch helplessly as the sniper kills not the president, but a Salvadoran Bishop who'd just been honored with the Medal of Freedom. Moments later, Jack Payne, supposed ally, shoots Bob Lee at point blank range. It's a setup. They're framing Bob Lee for the murder.
Bob Lee throws himself out a window and practically into the arms of surprised FBI Special Agent Nick Memphis, who's been assigned to the far outskirts of the presidential cavalcade. Nick is the same notorious agent who muffed the shot and hit the person he was trying to rescue - leaving her a quadriplegic for life.
Bob makes his escape good. Things are nowhere near as happy for Memphis. When the fleeing felon disarms him and steals his agency car, Nick takes yet another of what will become a progression of downward steps that could lead to the end of his career. Still, he can't help remembering the compassion in Bob Lee Swagger's eyes, and the fact that he didn't pull the trigger when he easily could have killed Nick.
What follows is one of the most intriguing rollercoasters of story line I've read in many years. Bob Lee and Nick join forces, and Bob Lee forgets all about his vow never to kill again. You can't help but feel that even though the two are up against the FBI and the dark forces of the super secret RamDyne Corporation, the federal agencies are the ones who don't have a chance. I loved this one. I've seen the movie, too: the book is ten times better. Read it. Skip the movie until after.
Art tirrell is the author of The Secret Ever Keeps
Book Review: The secret is Swagger
Summary: 5 Stars
This first in the Bob Lee Swagger series is a doozy. Swagger, one of the top Marine snipers in Vietnam but wounded and discharged from the service, lives as an Arkansas recluse for the next 15 years or so, losing himself in shooting and guns, accompanied only by his pet dog.
When he is asked for his expertise in testing some new long-range, high-accuracy ammunition, he takes a gingerly step back into the world. He soon finds that's not all they want; they're a secret agency with government ties that wants his help foiling a world-class sniper planning a world-class assassination.
Or is that really what they want? You know they're up to something rotten, like maybe framing him in a major assassination, and like a teenage girl at a scary movie you want to scream at the screen, "Don't do it, Bob!" But the real joy in these books - I've read a later one - is that you know, deep down, that Bob knows it too, and that he's already two steps ahead of them.
Nick Memphis, an FBI agent whose path crosses with Swagger's, is already on the agency's hitlist. Once a sniper, he missed a critical shot on a kidnapper that crippled a hostage and led to the deaths of others. He just works hard and wants redemption, but his contact with Swagger's case just gives the agency, and his ladder-climbing boss Howard Utey, more and more reasons to hate him.
The book has some fine bad guys in deep-dark-dirty operatives Colonel Shreck (named before the children's movie came out, I believe) and Jack Payne, and the wonderful technical detail on sniping that never gets tedious.
Hunter's writing is fine. He has a wry sense of humor: Bob, being tailed by the bad guys, stops at a convenient store to get an RC Cola and Moon Pie. Much is made about what will happen to those who mess with his dog. Some think these books are cartoonish, but I disagree. Today's novels are full of postmodern alternative-reality premises; Swagger novels are models of ultrarealism by comparism.
He reminds me of Elmore Leonard, the way he writes the voices of tough guys and real people - and his plots are way better than Leonard's. You see some of his devices coming, but he surprises in how he presents them. You know the showdown is coming but it's gripping nevertheless.
The secret is Swagger - his foresight, plotting actions out days in advance the way a sniper must, and his sense for where the shot must come from, who's going to make it and how, and what he, Swagger, must do to counter it.
Book Review: Well inside a minute of angle
Summary: 5 Stars
Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger was a Marine Corps sniper in Vietnam, who had killed eighty-seven of the enemy (confirmed). Almost as many as the real-life Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, who had 93 confirmed kills. Both men used a Remington model 700 bolt-action rifle.
Sergeant Swagger was severely wounded, and his spotter killed, by an enemy sniper. His wounds resulted in his disability retirement, and eventual permanent retirement from the Marine Corps. The bad guys in this book, working on contract for a central American regime, seek to assassinate an influential cleric whose politics are antithetical to their own, when the President of the United States is due to honor him with a decoration in New Orleans.
Swagger is not aware of the actual plot, and when they tell him that the president is the subject of an assassination attempt, and want him to tell them where the assassin is most likely to strike, pretending to be CIA, he goes along. Little does he know that he is being set up to be the "fall guy," and that the president is not the real target.
This is a well-plotted thriller, and it will keep you reading until you've finished the book. The suspense is maintained, and there is enough accurate detail about firearms, ballistics, and technical details to make it all highly believable. I have ordered another of Stephen Hunter's titles. If he does as well with the next as he did with this one, I'm hooked.
To make the story even more interesting, for me, Swagger, in the story, has a pre-'64 Winchester model 70 ("the rifleman's rifle") in .300 Holland & Holland (H&H) magnum caliber. I have one of the same rifles, in the same caliber, and it, too, will shoot sub-minute-of-angle.
This is a good book, written by one who has researched his subject.
Joseph (Joe) Pierre
author of Handguns and Freedom...their care and maintenance
and other books
Book Review: Suspend your disbelief...
Summary: 1 Stars
This book has an interesting plot, marred by some of the most far-fetched and convoluted action scenes I have ever encountered. Given the rather enthusiastic response given by other reviewers, there clearly are many who manage to suspend disbelief far more easily that I can manage.
Sadly, because of these reviews, I have bought this book and the other 3 in the series all together. Maybe I should keep them until I am too senile to spot these errors...
In case you think I am too harsh, a couple of samples:
1. Somebody wants to kill a South American archbishop. Instead of simply murdering him (or staging an accident if it has to appear accidental), they set up the most elaborate plot to make it appear that the target was the US president. Why? Surely it is vastly more difficult to assassinate the US president than some priest?
2. They now want to kill our hero. They lure him to a pre-selected secluded spot in the country. Instead of blowing him up with a bomb, or shooting him from ambush, they "herd" him onto a hilltop, so that their 100 imported soldiers (with 4 helicopter gunships!) can kill him. Needless to say, he kills almost everybody and gets away.
3. Yet again they want to kill him, this time during a hostage swap. They lure him into a secluded spot in the country, following a series of flares to his destination (why? - it alerted the FBI, unwanted by either side). Again, instead of simply shooting (they has a world class sniper) him as he arrived at any of the way points, they set up an elaborate trap that involves a shot at a mile. The day is saved by his friend (a failed ex-sniper) killing the main sniper with a head shot at 1000 yards (good shooting from a man who has previously missed body shots at 500 yards).
All in all the villains seem to have gone to the wily coyote school of ambush - very spectacular and utterly insane.
Book Review: You sure can't put it down
Summary: 3 Stars
Largely well written the story is so derivative it seems less a homage, than a cut and paste job. Lord Jim, for the torture that plays on vanity, the seven rescuers which has been done over and over, the heart of darkness for the river, and a Kurtz like character who has gone nuts, and so it does.The gang of old men is pretty offensive to the memories of the people involved. Why select characters drawn from real life, but then fictionalize them in ways that seem unlikely to be in character. And they wouldn't be a dream team. It is like the recent DC sniper issue of whether the "snipers" had to have training. You don't need training to make a 100 yard shot, you don't need legendary marksmen. You need folks you have known a long time, presumably from Swagger's military past. Criss-crossing the country, recruiting a movie star, it is laughable.
As usual the gun stuff, is only partly correct, despite the raft of advisors. He really needs a gun editor or something, since he seems to be partly always writing for a gun savvy audience. As Bridget Fonda says in Jackie Brown about her gunrunning keeper "He's just repeating stuff he's heard. He's no more a gun expert than you or me".
I wonder who the whipping advisor was. Is it true whips crack because they break the sound barrier? Sounds highly improbable to me. Flyrod/lines are basically whips, and they snap in the air, if you get your timing, in their case, wrong. It is just the very tip colliding with the near tip portion, going in opposite directions. To get to 1088 fps the whip would somehow have to juice up the speed of the tip by ten times the speed of the hand. Anyway you will have a lot of time to consider the phenomenon since he refers to it many times.
It's a story with a pulse. A bit embarrassing to read though, verges on the pornographic.