The Master Sniper
by Stephen Hunter
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stephen HunterEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-06-02
ISBN: 0440221870
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Island Books
Book Reviews of The Master Sniper
Book Review: Good but not his best:Start with Point of Impact
Summary: 4 Stars
Summer in the Mississippi delta: hot as an engine block, the kind of weather made for paperbacks by the pool. In that vein I have just completed, damply, the grand tour through Stephen Hunter's lexicon of gun-and-testosterone novels built around the cult of the lone rifleman and the wild killers from the hills and the dutiful men who oppose them.
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 couldn't care enough about the story to justify the effort in getting through the book. Don't 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't 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 channelled 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 falls 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 that 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 didn't 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.
Summary of The Master Sniper
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....
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