Baltimore Sun film critic Stephen Hunter is an unrivaled master of his craft. This extraordinary collection includes the best of Hunter's movie reviews, taking aim at one hundred of the most important (or notorious) violent films released since 1982. With an incisive, machine-gun style of writing, Hunter pulls no punches when he bashes Blue Velvet, Tombstone, and Legends of the Fall. And he doesn't hold back in his praise of The Wild Bunch, Goodfellas, and Reservoir Dogs.

Commenting on movies and society, Tarantino, Stone, and Peckinpah, Arnold...

They busted out of McAlester State Penitentiary--three escaped convicts going to ground in a world unprepared for anything like them....

Lamar Pye is prince of the Dirty White Boys. With a lion in his soul, he roars--for he is the meanest, deadliest animal on the loose....
Odell is Lamar's cousin, a hulking manchild with unfeeling eyes. He lives for daddy Lamar. Surely he will die for him....
Richard's survival hangs on a sketch: a crude drawing of a lion and a half-naked woman. For this Lamar has let Richard live...

Armed to the teeth, Lamar and his boys have cut a path of...

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...

Only one thing stands between a son and his father's killer: forty years of lies..
On a remote Arizona ranch, a man who has known loss, fear, and war weeps for the first time since he was a child. His tears are for the father taken from him four decades before in a deadly shoot-out. And his grief will lead him back to the place where he was born, where his father died, and where a brutal conspiracy is about to explode.
For Bob Lee Swagger, the world changed on that hot day in Blue Eye, Arkansas, when two local boys rode armed and wild in a '55 Fairlane convertible. Swagger's father,...

Paramilitary terrorists who have taken over a top-secret nuclear complex kidnap Maryland welder Jack Hummel and force him to cut through a half-ton titanium block that conceals the launch button.

The inspiration for the USA Network series Shooter -- ..". A harsh, visceral, novel of conspiracy and betrayal by veteran author Stephen Hunter... a distrubing mix that plays on our sense of history while at the same time it appeals to our darkest fantasies of rough justice." - Chicago Tribune

He was one the best Marine snipers in Vietnam. Today, twenty years later, disgruntled hero of an unheroic war, all Bob Lee Swagger wants to be left alone and to leave the killing behind.

But with consummate psychological skill, a shadowy military organization seduces...

Pale Horse Coming, featuring Stephen Hunter's beloved sniper heroes Earl and Bob Lee Swagger, the first of eleven Swagger thrillers from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

The time is 1951. A smooth-talking Chicago lawyer comes to chat with Sam Vincent, the former prosecutor of Polk County, Arkansas, about a dangerous subject--a big prison for violent black convicts near Thebes, Mississippi, up the Yaxahatchee River from Pasagoula. Thebes seems to have dropped out of the Union--letters and phone calls go unanswered, and the lawyer has questions that need answers. Would Sam--an...

November 1, 1950 -- an unseasonably hot afternoon in sleepy Washington, D.C. At 2:00 P.M. at his temporary residence in Blair House, President Harry Truman takes a nap. At 2:20 P.M., two Puerto Rican natives approach from different directions. Oscar Collazo, a respected metal polisher and family man, and Griselio Torresola, an unemployed salesman, don't look dangerous, not in their new suits and hats, not in their calm, purposeful demeanor, not in their slow, unexcited approach. What the three White House policemen and one Secret Service agent guarding the president cannot guess is...

From Pulitzer Prize-Winning Movie Critic Stephen Hunter Comes A Brilliant, Freewheeling, And Witty Look At The Movies.
Evanston, Illinois, was an idyllic 1950s paradise with stately homes, a beautiful lake, a world-class university, two premier movie houses, and one very seedy movie theater -- the Valencia.
This was the site of Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter's misspent youth. Instead of going to school, picking up girls, or tossing a football, Hunter could be found sitting in the fifteenth row, right-hand aisle seat of the Valencia, sating himself on one B-list...

High summer in Cuba, 1953, and Havana gleams with possibility. Flush with booming casinos, sex and drugs, Havana is a lucrative paradise for everyone. Of course, where there's paradise, trouble can't be far behind. Trouble, in this case, makes its entrance in the terrifically charismatic form of a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro.