Night of Thunder (Bob Lee Swagger Series #5) » (Reprint)

Stephen Hunter has written 16 novels. The retired chief film critic for The Washington Post, where he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, he has also published two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work, American Gunfight. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Woe unto him who crosses Bob Lee Swagger, especially when his daughter's life is at stake. Forced off the road and into a crash that leaves her in a coma, clinging to life, reporter Nikki Swagger had begun to peel back the onion of a Southern-fried conspiracy bubbling with all the angst, resentment, and dysfunction that Dixie gangsters can muster. An ancient, violent crime clan, possibly corrupt law enforcement, gunmen of all stripes and shapes, and deranged evangelicals rear their ugly heads, and will live to rue the day they targeted the wrong man's daughter. It's what you call your big-time bad career move. All of it is set against the backdrop of excitement and insanity that only a weeklong NASCAR event can bring to the backwoods of a town as seemingly sleepy as Bristol, Tennessee.
A master at the top of his game, Hunter provides a host of thrilling new reasons to listen as fast as we can. When Swagger picks up where his daughter left off, and his swift sword of justice is let loose, we find a true American hero in his most stunning action to date. And —in the form of Brother Richard, a self-decreed "Sinnerman" out of the old fire-and-brimstone tradition — Hunter offers up his most diabolical, engaging villain yet. A triumph of story, character, and style, Night of Thunder is Stephen Hunter at his very best.

Publishers Weekly

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. (Sept.)

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