Product Description

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....

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77372 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06-02
• Released on: 1996-06-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 432 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780440221876
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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

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

Customer Reviews

A Fast Paced Action Thriller
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

Good but not his best:Start with Point of Impact
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.

War in the Pacific is not the only theater he wrote about
This is not another Bob Lee Swagger tale, although it is about a sniper. Not a Marine Corps sniper, but a Wermacht sniper, in the last days of World War II. Apparently, Stephen Hunter likes to "reach out and touch someone" in his stories. He does a lot of stories based on snipers.

Hunter, by the way, spent his military service in the Army, not the Marine Corps. His bio does not discuss his Army experience, but he has encyclopedic knowledge about firearms, and if he makes a statement about a given model of firearm, or its ballistics, you can bet that he's done his research. He's done a lot of reading on the subject, but how much experience he has, again, is a questionmark. Not, I think, a competitive shooter.

This tale looks at the Office of Strategic Services (reinvented as the CIA) of "Wild Bill" Donovan during WWII, (much like Claire Chennault's Civil Air Transpory was reborn as Air America, the CIA outfit) and the Brit intelligence apparatus, for part of its setting. I was interested to see, again, a reference to Ernest Hemingway--not too flattering. He was also in Hunter's novel, Havana--drunk there, too. I wonder what Hunter has against Papa? Apparently just doesn't like him. I always did.

Another theme in this book is a strong current of sympathy for the Jewish people--not that they didn't deserve it, but I have noticed in Hunter's other books an almost obsessiveness about showing how badly treated were the blacks in the old South. He does seem to get caught up in these matters, a champion of the "underdog", although he uses variations on the "n-word" freely throughout all of his books, and I've read several of them.

These are not just fault-finding comments. Stephen Hunter is currently my favorite author in his genre, as I've said before. He's a wonderful storyteller. But, I think I've accurately detected both his political bent and his agenda, if he has one besides simply writing great stories. He's that rarity, a liberal who knows something about firearms, and may even be infatuated with them. I wish him well, and hope he continues to write great novels to a ripe old age.

Joseph (Joe) Pierre, USN (Ret)
author of Handguns and Freedom...their care and maintenance
and other books