The Master Sniper » (Unabridged)

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.

With a sniper’s rifle he has calmly executed hundreds of enemy soldiers in a single battle, and gunned down thousands of innocent civilians in a single day, waiting patiently for the barrel of his gun to cool before resuming his craft…
It is the spring of 1945. And Repp, the master sniper, is about to carry out his final mission even as Germany’s enemies overrun it, even while a tired, disorganized team of American and British agents tries everything in its power to stop him. Because for Repp, this is the job at which he cannot fail. For this time, he possesses the ultimate killing tool. And with it, he will commit the ultimate crime…

“Mesmerizing suspense,” Kirkus Reviews
“Hunter is a deft craftsman with a sure sense of pace and scene. He also knows about irony and sprinkles just a bit over every corpse.” The Washington Post
“Stephen Hunter is the best writer of straight-out thrillers working today.” Rocky Mountain News

Publishers Weekly

In the spring of 1945, Lieutenant-Colonel Repp, the titular sharpshooter of this compelling thriller, has been charged by his Nazi superiors in the collapsing Third Reich to commit a particularly despicable assassination. Aided by the deadly creativity of German military engineering, Repp, a cold-blooded killer, hones his skills on hapless death camp inmates before embarking on his mission, which will imprint the dark ideals of Nazism on the postwar world. It falls to Jim Leets, an American small-arms intelligence agent, to unravel the mystery of Repp's new weaponry and sinister assignment. With his fully realized characters, from the depressed but determined sleuth Leets to the ruthlessly dutiful Repp, Hunter (Black Light) has crafted an engrossing and vividly written tale that touches on the nascent Zionist movement and Allied indifference to the Holocaust on its intriguing path to a tense and satisfying climax. (July)