Black Light (Bob Lee Swagger Series #2)

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Stephen Hunter

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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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780440223139
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 4/28/1997
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 517
Sales rank: 66,125
Series: Bob Lee Swagger Series, #2
Product dimensions: 4.15 (w) x 6.85 (h) x 1.05 (d)

Meet the Author

Stephen Hunter

Bestselling author Stephen Hunter is a staff writer and film critic for The Washington Post and winner of The American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Distinguished Writing in Criticism (1998), as well as the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for film criticism. He has written many novels, including Havana, Pale Horse Coming, and The Day Before Midnight.

Read an Excerpt

Earl was not Sherlock Holmes; he wasn't any kind of big city homicide cop. He hadn't even worked a murder before, that is, as opposed to a killing, where the killer's identity was obvious from witnesses or known grudges. This was different: a body, abandoned for close to a week. It was a true mystery. It went way beyond anything Earl had ever tried before. But Earl Swagger was a serious professional law enforcement officer, committed to, perhaps even obsessed by, the twin masters of duty and justice. His mind was so rigid that he could only see one possible outcome of events before him, the execution of the murderer, and until that happened, he would feel a serious hole had been blown into the wall of the universe. It was up to him to plug it.

He set about it methodically, oblivious first to the odor of death which attended, second to the flies that hung and buzzed and finally to the obscenity of the crime itself. First thing: drawing the scene. Let the photogs do what they would later, he wanted to record, for his own uses, the overall look of the body, its relationship to the setting. He used the triangulation method, useful in outdoor settings where no baseline such as a road could be located.

He chose as his three points the closest tree, about 25 feet beyond the child's head, the edge of the vegetationless shale on which she lay and, off to the right, a stone humping out of the surface of the earth. Crudely, he did a stick figure version of her broken body, placing it between the landmarks.

Then he began an immediate site search for foot prints or other signs of disturbance in the earth, as well as other bits of personal evidence of the man or men who'd brought or dropped her here. But the land was so hard and dry it would register no such impression; instead a breeze kicked up, unfurling Shirelle's dress, throwing vapors of dust. Then, just as quickly, it subsided.

Earl went to the body itself. Later the criminal investigation team, the professionals, could make a more intense examination in search of microscopic information: fibers, body fluids, possible fingerprints, blood stains, that sort of thing. But he wanted to learn what he could from the poor child.

Speak to me, honey, he said, feeling such an aching tenderness come over him he could hardly abide it. Something in him yearned to take her up and cradle her against the pain. But there was no pain, there was no her anymore, only her swollen remains. Her soul was with God. He shook his head clear, and spoke again to her in his mind: Come on, now, you tell Earl who did this to you.

He looked into her blank and depthless eyes, at her utter, broken repose, at her bloodstains and bruises and cruel abrasions, and something hot and hopelessly unprofessional stole over him: he saw a vision of his own child, that serious, somber, hardworking little boy who seemed almost never to laugh: saw Bob Lee, snatched and brutalized like this, left to swell so much it spread his features over his face and for a second Earl stopped being a police officer but became any avenging father and through a red fog had an image of blowing a shotgun shell into the heart of whoever had done the thing, in the name of all fathers everywhere.

But then he had himself back and was cool again, asking dry professional questions, things easily measured, easily known. She was quite dusty. Was it from lying here these many days? Possibly, but more likely, he now believed, she'd been murdered somewhere else and dumped here. If indeed that rock was the murder weapon, there'd be a lot more blood. He bent and looked at the bloodstain congealed under her skull. The pattern of dispersal was regular and there was no sign of spatter, only a pool: that suggested that the blood had thickened and leaked out, slowly. Surely if the girl were thrashing as she was being killed, the blood would be more widely scattered. So he thought that whoever had done this had simply bashed her dead skull with a rock in order to make it look as if he'd killed her here. But why? What difference would it make? He bent close to her throat: yes, it was bruised under the gray swollen skin. Had she been strangled, not beaten, to death? He recorded the fact in his notebook.

Then he saw on a sliver of shoulder revealed by her twisted blouse a red smear, not wet but dry. He touched it: dust, red dust. Hmmm? He turned to her hand, and gently opened it. He bent and looked at her nails: under each of the four fingers was a half moon of what might have been blood but looked more like the same red dust he'd found on her shoulder. The forensics people would have to make that determination.

Red dust? Red clay, possibly? It hung in his mind, reminiscent something. Then he had it: about ten minutes outside Blue Eye, out route 88 near a wide spot in the road called Ink, was an abandoned quarry noted for its red clay deposits. It wasn't so marked on any maps but by the consensus of oral folklore folks called it Little Georgia, in homage to the red clay state.

He wrote "Little Georgia" on his notepad, among his other wordings.

He went to the other hand, which was twisted under her, still clenched in a deathly fist. But he thought he saw something in it, a scrap of paper or something. He should leave it, he knew but the temptation to know more was overwhelming. Gently, with his pencil as a kind of probe, he pried open her tiny hand, trying not to disturb a thing.

A treasure fell out. In Shirelle's left hand was a ball of material, crumpled and desperate, something she'd grabbed from her killer as he killed her. With his pencil, Earl opened it up. It appeared to the pocket of a cotton shirt. And it was--monogrammed!

Three letters, big as day: RGF.

Could it be that easy? Earl wondered. My god, could that be all there was to it? Finding Mr. RGF with a shirt with a pocket missing?

"Lawdie, lawdie, lawdie," someone was chanting.

Earl looked up. Lem Tolliver's considerable bulk was moving through the trees under the propulsion of great agitation.

"Earl, Earl, Earl!"

"What is it, Lem?" said Earl, rising.

I called em, Earl, and they gonna git here when they can."

"Earl, Jimmy Pye and his cousin Bubba shot up a Fort Smith grocery store. Oh, Earl, they done killed four people, even a cop! Earl, they got the whole state out looking for that boy!"

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Anonymous

Posted January 1, 2002

Stephen Hunter is the best thriller writer, hands down!

Bob Lee Swagger is the most dangerous man in fiction. His personality is perfect for a man who sees that he has a job to do and just does it, no matter how much mud he has to crawl through to get there. Sam Vincent is a true American hero, addled by senility but aided by a desire to know the truth. Stephen Hunter brings the characters, good and bad, to life so realistically it makes you want to pick up the phone and warn them what's coming. The heros and villians are true to life people as opposed to idealistic, unbelievable stereotypes. This book is impossible to put down.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted December 16, 2000

Will Satisfy Even The Most Intuitive Reader

Although the author points out most of the bad guys early in the story, he still furnishes enough surprises to satisfy even the most intuitive reader. BLACK LIGHT is Stephen Hunter's seventh novel and it continues the tale of Bob Lee Swagger who was introduced in POINT OF IMPACT.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted April 8, 2000

Point of Impact's beginning

First cabin entertainment. Gritty and real, a welcome return to realism in writing about real men that we haven't seen since Hemingway. Faint hearted anti-gun mamas will probably be aghast at some of Hunter's darker scenes; but they probably won't be reading it anyway. In the stalking scenes you feel a deep gut fear that even Stephen King can't match.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted March 27, 2010

ebook

Why isn't this available in ebook??????
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Chachatius

Posted September 26, 2009

more from this reviewer

I Also Recommend:

Not the worse book but not what I expected either

The book is entretaining but not breathtaking. I didn't like the authour's writting style. Too much time describing characters backgrounds and point of view of the same situation and not enough things happening. Furthermore the characters are not very well educated and the authour writtes incorporating this language.

Bottom line the book is entretaining just not MY type of thriller.
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Anonymous

Posted March 17, 2009

You can't forget the past

Bob Lee lives with ghost of the past, his own and his father's. They won't go away and it tears him apart inside causing pain among those that love him. He comes to grips with this and moves on but there is a price and both sides pay it. I still think Point of Impact is the better book and maybe time for Bob Lee to live for his family but not quite.
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Anonymous

Posted December 20, 2008

I Also Recommend:

Loved the book!

I liked the way the book moved back and forth from past to present and between characters. It made me want to hurry to the next chapter to see what had happened and where it was going. I can usually predict the outcome but this one had me guessing and was a surprise ending. I love it when I can't figure out how the plot will end. Great book and hard to put down. There are a few favorite authors that I can not wait for their next book to come out - Ludlam, Sandford and now Hunter!
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Anonymous

Posted December 21, 2007

Ex-Marine finds his father's killer

Stephen Hunter has fashioned a character who is a credit to his Medal of Honor father. He sets about to discover under what circumstances his father died. It seems an open and shut case until the obscure facts finally come to light and they are no where near what the reader anticipates. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in strong characterization,and especially to those who love home-spun heroes and have respect for firearms.
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Anonymous

Posted January 22, 2006

Typical Stephen Hunter!

Once again, another good Stephan Hunter book. I just reviewed another book that I could only get through no more than one chapter at a time. That isn't the case here. I read this book quickly. As in most of Hunter's books the hero seems more of a super hero which can be a little unrealistic at times but what the heck these books are fun to read. If you haven't tried one of Stephen Hunter's books yet then do so. I'm hooked!
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Anonymous

Posted January 29, 2003

Fabulous Thriller

Stephen Hunter has, once again, put together a great thriller. The scenes are realistic and "edge of your seat" and the pace is lightening fast.
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Black Light (Bob Lee Swagger Series #2)

Pick Up in Store

Available on NOOK devices and apps

All Available Formats + Editions

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

More About This Book

Overview

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

Wes Lukowsky

Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

Meet the Author

Stephen Hunter

Read an Excerpt

Customer Reviews

Rating Distribution

5 Star

4 Star

3 Star

2 Star

1 Star

Your Rating:

Your Recommendations:

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

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Reminder:

Recommend other products that relate to your review. Just search for them below and share!

Stephen Hunter is the best thriller writer, hands down!

Will Satisfy Even The Most Intuitive Reader

Point of Impact's beginning

ebook

Not the worse book but not what I expected either

You can't forget the past

Loved the book!

Ex-Marine finds his father's killer

Typical Stephen Hunter!

Fabulous Thriller