Black Light
Autor Stephen Hunteren Limba Engleză Paperback – 7 apr 1997
Observăm o precizie chirurgicală în proza lui Stephen Hunter. Frazele sunt scurte. Tensiunea este palpabilă. Stilul său nu irosește niciun cuvânt, imitând rigoarea unui trăgător de elită. În Black Light, ritmul este alert, dictat de urgența unei descoperiri dureroase. Patru decenii de minciuni stau între un fiu și adevărul despre asasinarea tatălui său. Bob Lee Swagger plânge pentru prima dată pe un ranch izolat din Arizona. Lacrimile devin combustibil pentru o investigație care explodează în Blue Eye, Arkansas. Earl Swagger, polițist de stat, a murit într-un lan de porumb pustiu în 1955. Oficial, a fost un schimb de focuri. Realitatea este însă mult mai întunecată. Ne-a atras atenția modul în care Hunter împletește destinele personajelor din Point Of Impact și Dirty White Boys, creând o tapiserie complexă a violenței și onoarei. Cititorul care a apreciat vânătoarea de proporții și secretele militare din Time To Hunt va găsi aici aceeași atmosferă de conspirație densă, dar într-un context mult mai personal, legat de rădăcinile familiei Swagger. Față de abordarea istorică din The Third Bullet, unde miza era asasinarea lui JFK, aici miza este identitatea și moștenirea de sânge a protagonistului. Hunter scrie scene de acțiune care se derulează cinematografic, menținând un suspans constant până la confruntarea finală.
Preț: 60.78 lei
Carte disponibilă
Livrare economică 29 mai-12 iunie
Specificații
ISBN-10: 044022313X
Pagini: 528
Dimensiuni: 106 x 174 x 30 mm
Greutate: 0.25 kg
Editura: Random House
De ce să citești această carte
Recomandăm această carte celor care caută un roman polițist de mare viteză, unde precizia tehnică se întâlnește cu o poveste emoționantă despre tată și fiu. Cititorul câștigă o experiență de lectură intensă, marcată de rigoarea unui autor premiat cu Pulitzer. Este piesa centrală a seriei Swagger, esențială pentru a înțelege motivațiile personajului Bob Lee.
Despre autor
Stephen Hunter (născut pe 25 martie 1946) este un romancier american, eseist și critic de film de renume, distins cu Premiul Pulitzer. Expertiza sa în domeniul armamentului și al istoriei militare conferă operelor sale un realism tehnic rar întâlnit în beletristică. Este faimos pentru crearea personajului Bob Lee Swagger, un lunetist de elită ale cărui aventuri explorează teme precum onoarea, corupția politică și justiția individuală. Cariera sa de critic de film își pune amprenta asupra stilului narativ, romanele sale având o structură vizuală, extrem de dinamică.
Extras
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!"
Descriere scurtă
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.
Recenzii
--The Chicago Tribune
"Nobody writes action better than Stephen Hunter and Black Light is one of his best...[The] action scenes play like a movie, the plot is intriguing and the writing is top-notch."
--Phillip Margolin
"Only a handful of writers today can match Hunter for imagination and the ability to make a reader's adrenaline rush."
--New York Daily News
"Filled with detail, clever plotting, suspense, and a hunt to the death that leaves the reader dry-mouthed with tension. Hunter knows his guns, and he writes about them with a precision that holds the attention of even a fervent anti-gun supporter."
--The Orlando Sentinel
"One of the most skilled hands in the thriller business. The plot is fast-paced, well-constructed and builds to a pulse-pounding night ambush. . .it should seal his reputation as an author who not only can write bestselling thrillers, but write them exceedingly well. "
--Publishers Weekly