Night of Thunder

July 28, 2008
Near the start of Hunter's cartoonish fifth Bob Lee Swagger thriller (after The 47th Samurai
), Nikki Swagger, the series hero's journalist daughter, is seriously injured when a hit man runs her car off the road in Tennessee hill country. Despite Swagger's fears that the legion of enemies he's made over the years are responsible for the attack, the former marine leaves Nikki vulnerable to another attempt on her life in the hospital where she's being treated—an attempt foiled only by chance in the nick of time. Such plot-driven implausibilities are rampant as Swagger investigates his daughter's recent assignments, which lead him to drug-running along the Tennessee-Virginia border and to a NASCAR event. At the violence-filled conclusion, one of the supporting characters, in keeping with the book's overall arms-length relationship with realism, says, “In some perverted way, I think everybody who didn't die or lose their business kind of enjoyed it.” Hunter fans may feel similarly.

September 1, 2008
Bob Lee Swagger is back, but hes hurting. That last scrape he got into with the samurai (The 47th Samurai, 2007) left him with bum legs, nightmares, and white hair.But its no country for old men when Bobs daughter, Nikki, now an investigative reporter in Tennessee, is nearly killed by a psycho called Sinnerman, whose weapon of choice is his car. Hunters premise this time encompasses not only the inevitable showdown between Bob and a purely evil adversary (think Gary Busey as Sinnerman), but also the wacky world of NASCAR. Its race week in Bristol, Tennessee, and as Bob attempts to figure out who attacked Nikki, hesmells a plot afoot to disrupt theevent. All the story lines come together around a degenerate evangelist who doubles as the patriarch of a legendary redneck crime family, the Grumleys (a wildly bent version of Grandpappy Amos and the Real McCoys). Hunter comes close to going over the top this time (the inevitable cataclysm at the NASCAR event is a pyrotechnical extravaganza as campy as it is violent), but he grounds the craziness with his characteristically precise prose, detailing not only the firepower used by Bob and his adversaries but also the cars they drive. NASCAR fans are sure to have a high old time with this novel, and if longtime Swagger followers feel a bit uncomfortable with the cartoony element here, there are more than enough signature Bob Lee momentsa hard man forced to be hardto keep their blood roiling.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)