I, SNIPER. By Stephen Hunter. Simon and Schuster. 418 pages. $26.
Stephen Hunter, a veteran author and Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, has scored a bull's-eye with I, Sniper, the sixth novel in the Bob Lee Swagger series.
When four Vietnam-era anti-war personalities are shot down in three separate incidents by a sniper, FBI agent Nick Memphis enters the fray to find the culprit. And when evidence leads him to a retired Marine sniper's home, he finds a command post for a final mission to kill the traitorous peaceniks and secure the highest body count in U.S. sniper history. When the sniper is found in a hotel near the killings, dead of apparent suicide, the case is all but closed. But to Nick, these killings are just too perfect, too tidy in the way the evidence leans. So Nick enlists the help of his old friend, Bob Lee Swagger, himself a retired Marine sniper -- and a man known for the clarity with which he deduces meanings and motives from the lay of the land or the scene of a crime.
So as Nick and Swagger twist and turn through the plot, the story morphs from an intricate and slowly developing murder mystery to an action thriller that will thwart most readers' efforts to stop reading at bedtime. I, Sniper is no ordinary shoot-'em-up populated by two-dimensional characters following formula by rote, but a smartly paced and well-developed work of fiction that aims for a more sophisticated audience than do most books of this genre.
Author Stephen Hunter makes Swagger stand out from the crowd by breaking with the mainstream mindset of how a sniper protagonist should appear, think and act. So much so that when his book Point of Impact was made into the 2007 movie Shooter, the Tinsel Town powers-that-be trimmed 15 years off Swagger's age, beefed him up in the form of hunk actor Mark Wahlberg, and made him a veteran of a much more recent conflict in Ethiopia instead of Vietnam.
Even in I, Sniper, Swagger at times comes across as larger than life with a personal history to match. A respected member of the killer elite, Swagger, in a nostalgic moment, toasts, "Here's to the USMC, which gave us three hots, a cot, a rifle, and a target-rich environment." But to belie the knee-jerk, jarhead slant of his toast, Swagger's personal motive in Vietnam was not inspired by bloodlust, but by an earnest attempt to save the lives of his fellow Marines by eliminating those who would kill them.
And to break with stereotype further, Swagger is decidedly non-Rambo-esque; rather than pages personifying Swagger as a young muscle-bound hothead, we're presented with a fairly diminutive man in the autumn of life who just happens to think it's worthwhile to verify that his deceased brother-in-arms hasn't had his memory tarnished with what might be a frame-up contrived as cover for a larger crime. This, as it turns out, proves to be the crux of the matter -- and the driving force behind Swagger's idealistic motives as he moves inexorably toward a final showdown that pits him man-to-man and gun-to-gun with the master villain.
Steven Beach is a writer who lives in Lawsonville.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement