by Stephen Hunter
Beach Book of the Week
WITH DIRTY WHITE BOYS AND POINT OF IMPACT, HUNTER, a Baltimore Sun movie critic, blasted into the front rank of thriller novelists. His sharpshooter's eye for contrasting moral purity and psychopathic evil scored bull's-eyes with readers and critics. This time he zeroes in on an Olympic-caliber tale. Back from Impact is Vietnam War super sniper Bob "the Nailer" Swagger, who wants only to work his Arizona horse ranch and forget his body-strewn past. But young newspaperman Russ Pewtie won't leave history, or Swagger, alone. Pewtie plans to write a book about Bob's father, an Arkansas state trooper who was gunned down in 1955 by a very bad piece of work named Jimmy Pye. Russ's reason: Jimmy's equally sociopathic son Lamar Pye nearly killed his heroic father (White Boys' stalwart cop) in 1994. By the final showdown, the unlikely pair of investigators has zigzagged through '50s racism, organized crime in Little Rock and an unauthorized military operation code-named Black Light. Hunter not only entertains with rapid-fire action, but he catches in his unsparing crosshairs the frayed denim of American good and evil. (Doubleday, $23.95)
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