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| Point of Impact | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephen Hunter
Publisher: Bantam
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (185 reviews)
Sales Rank: 4298
Languages: English (Unknown), English (Original Language), English (Published)
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 592
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 0553563513
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780553563511
ASIN: 0553563513
Publication Date: December 1, 1993
Release Date: November 1, 1993
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Fantastic Page Turner November 28, 2007
I know that the summer is winding down, vacations are finishing up, school will soon be starting, and the chance for some additional recreational reading is quickly coming to a close. But don't just yet stop reading. You have one more book to get through, Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter.
I came across this book as I was beginning to watch The Shooter. That movie is based on the novel, Point of Impact. Since the movie was rather good, I wanted to know what the author was really had in mind, and headed off to the library to get a copy. As an aside, our library has a "cheat sheet." If there is a recent movie that you enjoyed, they have a list of the books that were used as the basis for the movie. Pretty cool, I thought.
Bob Lee "The Nailer" Swagger lives alone, in a cabin in the woods. Everything that he ever wanted is gone, except for an old dog and his guns. He was once a extremely gifted sniper in Vietnam, until someone shot him, and killed his spotter, from 1400 yards. After the shooting, he was no longer able to perform his duties and he retired to the mountainside. A footnote in the war. Until retired Colonel Shreck comes calling. He has a proposal for Bob Lee, help them figure out where a sniper will attempt the assassination of the President of the United States. Bob accurately details the site that the assassin will use, but is shot by one of Shreck's men and framed for the hit. He teams up with an FBI agent, who he himself was once a sharpshooter. Together, they track the actual killer, Shreck and his organization, and a few Salvadoran gun men.
This novels moves. There are times, where Hunter exposes you to the gun culture, that some would say drags the story down a bit, but I found the background on the culture fascinating and a key part of the novel. Also, the novel ends in a courtroom, which would see anti-climatic after the action, but wait for the payoff. Bob Lee is a very well thought out character and the novel allows the reader to understand where he comes from, his duty to the United States, and that he feels that he has unfinished business. Much more than the movie, and you would expect that. This is a character that I see Hunter brings back for a few more novels. He is another Reacher, and I have now added another author to my list of "must reads."
An excellent novel.
 Point of Impact- HITS THE MARK October 5, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Point of Impact
This book is the screenplay for the movie "Shooter". I first read the book about twelve years ago, it was so superb that it stuck with me. I was convinced that it was the basis for the very exciting movie, after some resaearch online, I was proven right. I read on average of three books a month and "Point of Impact" is on my top five ever. Bob Lee swagger uses his most accurate shots in the climactic courtroom scene, and the reader is left grinning and wanting a sequel.
A Great Read! September 16, 2007
Clancy-like technical writing and Ludlam-like action. Throw in Grisham for good measure and you won't put thisbook down. The action just keeps on coming. Some brilliant writing that made a good movie (but the book was much better, as usual). Highly recommend this one.
 Oh come on! August 1, 2007
5 out of 21 found this review helpful
This has to be one of the worst suspense novels I've ever read. Stephen Hunter makes a number of technical errors and implausible scenarios to try to make up for his wooden prose and lack of understanding of the shooter's culture.
- For instance, early on he claims that a villain carries an "automatic shotgun" under his coat. Then a chapter later he changes it to a "pump shotgun". Sure Benelli makes the M3 Super 90 now, but it's clear that Hunter doesn't know this (was the M3 even in existence when he wrote the book?). He just fails to pay attention to detail.
- Then he places the hero on a hilltop, has him rapid fire over 45 rounds through a .308 with hot hand loads at moving targets at variable distances, hero never misses, over a 145 men turn tail and run, then he fires a shot at over 1,200 yards offhand (or kneeling) and hits all three rounds on a single concealed target. Of course Hunter probably believes that a bull barrel might make up for heat stress but...oops, he forgets to have that particular rifle bull barreled (which probably wouldn't help anyway).
- Oh, and let's not forget the main premise of the whole story: hero fires a bullet through his rifle, villains recover the bullet, put it through a slightly larger barrel with a paper patch or sabot, bad guy then makes a precision kill at well over 1,500 yards. Yeah....right.
- The poor woman hostage has a bad guy tape a shotgun to her head with his finger on the trigger. The hero blows off the guy's arm at the elbow.... at six feet... with 00 buck... firing from the hip. Somehow he miraculously misses the woman (who was supposed to be between the two antagonists). She falls backward on the gun and severed arm and the shotgun doesn't go off. Then the hero goes through a gut-wrenching worry fest while trying to disconnect the girl from the shotgun because he's worried the gun might go off with the bad guy's finger perched on the trigger. *GROAN* THEN he takes the arm/shotgun and tosses it "as far away as he could".... so he just spent five minutes worrying that it might go off and then he hap-hapzardly launches it through the air.
The story line is weak. The dialog is unimaginative and dependent on cultural cliches. The characters are one-dimensional to the extreme. There is no suspense and everything in the end plays out exactly as you would expect it to from such a formulaic plot line. The only piece of mystery in the whole story is so implausible that you'll laugh at it when Hunter finally deems to tell you his big mystery.
If you know very little about guns (or just enough to write a hack novel) or don't particularly care about good writing then you will probably like this book.
One of the best action-packed book I had in years... July 27, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Stephen Hunter really did a good job in packing all the actions and excitement into one book. Very well laid out plots and you could really feel the characters. It was so breath-taking that you just kept on turning the pages...
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