The Master Sniper (Mass Market Paperback)

by Stephen Hunter (Author) "The guards in the new camp were kinder..." (more)
Key Phrases: master sniper, forty kilos, Anlage Elf, Herr Obersturmbannführer, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"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

"Mesmerizing  suspense..."--Kirkus -- Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Island Books (June 2, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0440221870
• ISBN-13: 978-0440221876
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #35,295 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fast Paced Action Thriller, October 22, 1998

By A Customer

Master Sniper

Murder, conspiracy, Nazis, and guns. If any of those words spark a flame of interest in your mind Master Sniper is a must read. Master Sniper is a novel of twisted murder conspiracies, evil bad guys, and any good novel isn't great without a World War II setting. I personally would recommend this book to any action book fan. This is by far the best book ever written by Stephen Hunter. Set back into the time of Nazi Germany, when Hitler and swing music were dominating the planet. In a German concentration camp a Jewish poet is being held captive, working 16 hours a day just to stay alive. One night they are led into a field in the heart of the Black Forest in Germany. One by one the Jewish prisoners are being sniped. The poet realizes what is happening and tries to escape. He succeeds. In London an American Sargent discovers a new weapon that can snipe better than any other weapon known to man, and with it the Germans can snipe even Eisenhower himself. But the target isn't Eisenhower, it's some one bigger the Eisenhower. Through out the story Leets, the American Sargent discovers more than he ought to know about the Reich. I personally would recommend this book to any one who loves to read historical fiction. I was first drawn to this book because it sounded like an action thriller that would sustain me through an 8-hour long plane ride. Then when I had read it I realized that it had more depth. This is the best novel ever written by Stephen Hunter. There really aren't many details about the book that are bad. Some good parts about the book are that one, the book is realistically placed (in time, setting, and character opinions.) in relation to the time period. In Conclusion, this book is a great, must read novel that deserves five out of five stars.

-Sean Villard

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good but not his best:Start with Point of Impact, July 31, 1997

By A Customer

Summer in the Mississippi delta: hot as an engine block, the kind of weather made for paperbacks by the pool. In that vein I have just completed, damply, the grand tour through Stephen Hunter's lexicon of gun-and-testosterone novels built around the cult of the lone rifleman and the wild killers from the hills and the dutiful men who oppose them. I liked them all, more or less: the Point of Impact/Dirty White Boys/Black Light trilogy; the now-dated cold-war era countdown to Armageddon "The Day Before Midnight"; and even the weak sister (now there's a Bob Lee Swagger phrase if i've heard one) of the bunch, "The Master Sniper." Hunter has the mind and the method of the sniper down cold; the author bio mentions Hunter's time in Vietnam, so maybe he is really in the know. In these technical aspects he is unmatched, and his prose is smooth and elegant. He can describe a shooting like no other author I've ever read. THe problem with "Master Sniper" is that I just couldn't care enough about the story to justify the effort in getting through the book. Don't read on if you are intent on reading the book yourself. A legendary SS sniper is loosed by Himmler himself to hunt down and kill a prominent Zionist's son in his Swiss refuge. For a killer who has mowed down two or three hundred Russians in a day's work, this presents no insurmountable moral obstacle, for like all of Hunter's villains and some of his heroes, the sniper kills dispassionately, except for the endorphin storm the act of killing releases in the killer. The hitch is that our sniper can't be sure which of the twenty-odd kids holed up in the Swiss Alpine convent is the right one. No matter; with his cumbersome but deadly infrared night scope he'll take them all out in pitch darkness. The development of this early infrared sight is a major plot thread, and is some of the most interesting reading of the book. No kid, no inheritance, no fortune to be channelled to postwar Zionist causes. Even better,Himmler figures he'll appropriate the money for the SS and use it to help ex-SS men escape the Allies' Nuremberg noose: ODESSA gets a pay raise. A potentially interesting hook, but it falls flat here in Hunter's telling. His adversary is a downtrodden American OSS firearms expert, with a shot-up leg and a romance gone bad. I found it very hard to like or admire this Leets, alternating between lovesick puppy and man of steely resolve; and I failed to see how shooting the kid would really stop the Zionists' progress. Maybe my brain has been cooked in my skull by the glare and heat at poolside, but I never quite figured why the kid had to die so that the SS could get his inheritance. And I never grew fond enough of Leets to really care if he succeeded in stopping our Nazi. I found myself rooting for the sniper much of the time since he is the book's most exciting actor. In summary, the book is filled with tight, tactile, multisensory prose but the storyline itself just didn't reel me in like those of Hunter's other works. If you start with "The Master Sniper", give Hunter another chance before you write him off your summer reading list. Better to start with "Point of Impact" and tag along with Bob Lee Swagger for a while. Lotsa shooting without all the angst.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not His Best But Good All The Same, April 7, 2002

By	John G. Hilliard (Toronto Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I will always give this author the benefit of the doubt and pick up his work. This work is good and he does a good job in an area he is not normal in, World War Two. As always with him you get a lot of detail and a patience he always seems to give to his main shooter comes through in the writing. The character set is interesting, he stated away from too many of the stereotypes. He always has a good amount of action and this book comes through in that regard. This was not his best work but it is still very good.