Sniper's Honor: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel

From Booklist *Starred Review* 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. --Bill Ott

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