Sniper's Honor

March 31, 2014
Bestseller Hunter's absorbing ninth Bob Lee Swagger novel (after 2013's The Third Bullet) finds Swagger retired and living on a farm in the Pacific Northwest with an emotionally unsatisfied wife and memories of his sniper glory days. Swagger finds renewed purpose in life after Washington Post reporter Kathy Reilly pulls him in on a story that she's writing from Moscow on Ludmilla Petrova, a beautiful and equally decorated sniper who served in the Soviet Army during WWII and mysteriously disappeared from all records seven decades ago. As Reilly and Swagger travel from the Russian capital to the Ukrainian countryside in search of a resolution to Petrova's story, Swagger develops a keen infatuation with the enigmatic and alluring "White Witch," even as his obsession arouses unwanted suspicion from both the German and Russian governments. You don't have to be a fan of military action fiction to enjoy this installment.

May 1, 2014
In his latest Bob Lee Swagger adventure, Hunter (The Third Bullet, 2013, etc.) sends the indefatigable warrior into the Carpathian Mountains.Swagger's 68 now, retired to the Cascades, his sniper heroics in Vietnam and thereafter left to history books. When long-time friend and veteran reporter Kathy Reilly calls to question him about firearms, Swagger learns that she's investigating Ludmilla Petrova, a blonde beauty known as the White Witch, a World War II Russian sniper. Petrova, despite heroics at Stalingrad, Kursk and elsewhere, has disappeared from postwar records. Reilly's curious. Swagger's intrigued. He's also willing to help, even if it means flying to Russia. With eight Swagger adventures on the books, Hunter knows his hero like a brother: righteous character firmly set, crafty intelligence thoroughly hidden, stone-cold willing to take the shot if a bad actor must die. Swagger and Reilly end up in Ukraine, thwarting evildoers ranging from an off-the-reservation U.S. clandestine operator to a mobbed-up anti-Semitic Russian oligarch with family connections to Nazi-sympathizing WWII double agents. In the Carpathian wilderness, Swagger's sniper instinct helps Reilly uncover Petrova's WWII exploits, from Kursk, where she went rogue during the massive tank battle, to tiny, isolated Yaremche, Ukraine, where she was sent on a suicide mission to kill an Obergruppenfuhrer named Groedl. Swagger displays mighty tradecraft, employing a British Enfield sniper rifle secreted in a Carpathian Mountain cave since 1944. Hunter adds an exotic bad guy, Yusef Salid, SS-trained cousin of Jerusalem's grand mufti, who leads Serbian Nazis into the killing fields, but Hunter doesn't forget the "good Germans"-a decimated squad of paratroopers trying to do the right thing in spite of the "nutcase paperhanger from Austria." Despite a not-wholly-related narrative thread highlighting Mossad's mad skills in frustrating Russian-Iranian anti-Israel machinations, Hunter loads up a whole magazine of action, double-dealing and gun porn.

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Starred review from May 1, 2014
Time is taking its toll on Bob Lee Swagger: He was an old man in a dry month . . . hard, stoic, isolated, unmelted. The former sniper has been out of the game a long time, and, sadly, nothing has ever replaced what he's appalled to call the killing fever. Then his friend Kathy Reilly, Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, sends Bob an e-mail asking for his help in researching a story about legendary WWII Russian sniper Ludmilla Milli Petrova, whose name mysteriously disappeared from the historical record around 1945. Why was she expunged from both German and Russian records? Will Swagger help Reilly track the story? Of course he will, and so begins a remarkably textured novel that jumps between the war and the present, slowly unraveling Milli's past while Swagger and Reilly discover that, even 70 years after the fact, there are still people who don't want the story told. Hunter does a wonderful job of moving between and ultimately connecting his multiple story lines, and he peoples the stage with at least a dozen memorable characters, from Milli and her cohorts through the Nazis who hunt them, and, of course, to Swagger himself, an ever-more-complex character as he ages. Perhaps most memorable of all, though, is Hunter's vivid re-creation of the carnage on the Eastern Front, where, as Milli notes, the Russians' only advantage over the Germans was numbers: If they kill us five to one, we bring six to one . . . we shall prevail because, all things being equal, we can outbleed them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)