Tense, smart, fast-moving action starring the future father of Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger.
Earl Swagger’s heroics are let loose in the deadly fields of World War II France.
After D-Day, Allied forces take heavy casualties from snipers in France’s rolling hills and farmland checkered with mazes of hedgerows and brush fences. The French call the area the bocage, but the troops know it as “the bullet garden.” One relatively lucky soldier takes a shot in the hip: “Man, did he go down, full of spangles and fire flashes and lightning bugs and flies’ wings.” Worse, as many as 1,500 men take slugs right beneath the helmet and behind the ear, ripping through the brain. The enemy has a marksman who is so good that it doesn't matter what you're doing: “If he fires you're dead.” The Allied army and the Office of Strategic Services decide to find their own best sharpshooter to hunt the sniper down. They pick Marine Gunnery Sgt. Earl Swagger, already a veteran of Guadalcanal, Bougainville, and Tarawa, with a hard-earned reputation as a war god, of always being right, knowing everything, fearing nothing, and having been “born so brave bullets were afraid of him.” So he becomes an army major for his stint in Europe, and he begins his hunt. At the site of one killing, a soldier sneezes, and that of all things gives Swagger a clue on the road to finding his prey. The author offers up great descriptions that invite the reader to fill in the blanks: “No one would call him handsome; no one would call him ugly. He was simply a Marine.” The hero isn’t given to chitchat or emotion, and there isn’t a maudlin molecule in his body. That’s all to the good for a man of the gun. The villain gets to show his personality, showing a flicker of humanity as he remembers a lost love—but he’s a killer at his core. If he isn’t killing, he isn’t living. Meanwhile, there’s a spy plot set in London, where the slimy Mr. Raven lurks in the nighttime with a scarf covering his deviated septum. The story is loaded with colorful characters, crisp dialogue, bullets, and blood.
Tense, smart, fast-moving action starring the future father of Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-982-16976-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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