The Master Sniper »

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.

It is the spring of 1945, and the Nazis are  eliminating all the witnesses to their horrible crimes,  including Jews and foreigners remaining in the  prison camps. Kommandant Repp, who is known as a  master sniper, decides to hone his sniping abilities  by taking a little target practice at the  remaining laborers in his own prison camp. But one man  escapes and becomes the key to solving the mystery  of the cold, calculating Kommandmant Repp and his  plans for ending the war.

Repp was  the master sniper whose deadly talent had come to  the notice of British Intelligence as the linchpin  of a desperate Nazi plot to reverse the fortunes  of the Third Reich at the eleventh hour. But what  was the nature of the weapon that Repp was to  aim—and who was to be his last target? Allied  Intelligence officers Leets, from the U.S., and  Outhwaite from England are dispatched to identify and  abort his lethal mission. And when they finally  learn the truth, the Second World War's deadliest  race against time is on....

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)