Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
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, Earl, a state trooper, was investigating the brutal murder of a young woman that day. By midnight Earl Swagger lay dead in a deserted cornfield.
Now Bob Lee wants answers. He wants to know the truth behind the shoot -out that took his father's life, a mystery buried in forty years of lies. Because for Bob Lee Swagger, the killing didn't end that day in Blue Eye, Arkansas. The killing had just begun...
Weaving together characters from his national bestsellers Point of Impact and Dirty White Boys, Stephen Hunter's gripping thriller builds to an exhilarating climax—and an explosion of gunfire that blasts open the secrets of two generations.
Synopsis
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, Earl, a state trooper, was investigating the brutal murder of a young woman that day. By midnight Earl Swagger lay dead in a deserted cornfield.Now Bob Lee wants answers. He wants to know the truth behind the shoot -out that took his father's life, a mystery buried in forty years of lies. Because for Bob Lee Swagger, the killing didn't end that day in Blue Eye, Arkansas. The killing had just begun...
Publishers Weekly
Point of Impact hero Bob Swagger is back and in hot pursuit of the man who killed his father. (May)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Point of Impact hero Bob Swagger is back and in hot pursuit of the man who killed his father. (May)Library Journal
After Dirty White Boys (LJ 10/15/94), another yarn of Southern ultraviolence.Wes Lukowsky
Former marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger--Bob the Nailer from Hunter's "Point of Impact" (1993)--has finally found a bit of peace at 50: wife, daughter, and anonymity. Then a young writer cracks Swagger's shell: he wants to write a book about Swagger's father, Earl, an Arkansas state trooper killed in the line of duty 40 years earlier. Bob Lee isn't interested until he reads some of his father's old notebooks. Inconsistencies between his father's notes and the official version of the case prompt Bob Lee to throw in with the kid. They return to Bob Lee's western Arkansas home and soon realize they are decidedly unwelcome. A great deal of effort was expended to muddy the waters around Earl Swagger's death, and whoever did it is still around. Readers expecting a standard, 45-caliber thriller are in for a pleasant surprise. This multigenerational novel reads like a cross between Robert Penn Warren and Robert B. Parker. Bob Lee Swagger has a tenuous grip on the present that he'll never relinquish until he understands the painful past. A killing when he was 10 years old formed his life; he may need to kill again to break the mold. To quickly label Hunter's gripping story a "thriller" is to do it a disservice; "Black Light" is a brooding, thoughtful novel that just happens to contain more than a few incandescent thrills.Kirkus Reviews
The veteran thriller writer's third tale featuring the honorable sniper Bob Lee Swagger (Point of Impact, 1992; Dirty White Boys, 1994).This time out, Swagger has to be coaxed into the fray by a young journalist, Russ Pewtie, who wants to write a book about Swagger's father, Earl, a western Arkansas highway patrolman killed in the line of duty in 1955. Russ's own father is a heroic trooper; there are certain parallels between a case his father handled and the way the elder Swagger died that Russ wants to explore. Bob Swagger has never quite confronted the facts surrounding his own father's murder, but Russ is the impetus he needs, and the two hit the road for the town of Blue Eye. Soon enough, it develops that someone doesn't want the two men snooping. They're nearly ambushed by ten professional gunmen on a forlorn mountain road, but Bob, being very good at his business, turns the tables. The bloody climax is cat-and-mouse stuff using state-of-the-art, heat-seeking nightscopes (the black light of the title), and Hunter ekes out every milligram of suspense, holding back his secrets until the last few pages. The best character here is an old lawyer, Sam, who's simultaneously in mad pursuit of the truth and forgetful of what he's doing. Hunter also has a nice touch depicting race relations in southwest Arkansas—he does not, much to his credit, try to impose modern views on Bob and Russ's fathers or their contemporaries.
When Russ does library research, Hunter not only gets the procedure wrong but tries to make the utterly routine seem dangerous and complex, like something from Mission: Impossible. But, overall, the author is compulsively readable: His weapons scenes work, and so does his cliffhanger structure.