You can get anything you want in postwar Hot Springs, Arkansas--girls, gambling, drugs, or booze--courtesy of gangster Owney Madden, a picaresque character who affects jodhpurs, ascots, and an English accent to disguise his origins in New York's Hell's Kitchen. A county prosecutor, ambitious for higher office, sees Madden's destruction as the key to his political future, and he thinks Medal of Honor winner Earl Swagger is the right man to break Madden's stranglehold on the corrupt city.

A decent man haunted by his warrior past as well as the memory of his suffering at the hands of an abusive father, Earl yearns for the peace and quiet of domesticity with his wife Junie and the child she carries. But his need for "the hot pounding of the gun, the furious intensity of it all," is even more compelling. Earl's fearlessness in the face of danger is his defense against guilt over having survived both the war and his father's cruelty. Tasked with training a commando cadre to destroy Madden's criminal enterprise, Earl finds a way to channel his violent nature in the service of justice, despite his suspicions about his boss's political agenda, which threatens to compromise his assignment and destroy his team.

A prequel to Stephen Hunter's three well-reviewed suspense thrillers starring Earl's son, former marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger (Point of Impact, Black Light, Dirty White Boys), Hot Springs is bloody, hard-boiled fiction at its best. Hunter's precise descriptions of combat, hardware, and commando training are rendered in spare, uncluttered prose, and the melodrama around a key subplot--Earl's tangled, love-hate relationship with his murdered father--enhances rather than detracts from the novel's superb pacing and powerful narrative. Another subplot, involving Madden's rivalry with Bugsy Siegel, whose plan to create a rival sin city in Las Vegas threatens his own prominence, is less successful, but that's a minor quibble. While it's the only part of Hot Springs that doesn't fully engage the reader, it highlights Hunter's verisimilitude in depicting the heady post-World War II era. This is a highly readable book that should send grateful fans to Hunter's backlist as soon as they've turned the last page. --Jane Adams


From Publishers Weekly
Furnished with brilliant period detail and a dynamo of a lead character, this big, brawny crime drama recountsDin highly fictionalized formDthe true story of the backlash against corruption and decadence in Hot Springs, Ark., during the years following WWII. Bobby Lee Swagger, the Vietnam vet hero of three of Hunter's previous books (most recently, Time to Hunt), is here supplanted as protagonist by his father. Earl Swagger, a fierce, highly decorated WWII Pacific theater warrior, is a man haunted by the horrors of war, as well as by the abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his brutal father. Recruited by the district attorney in Hot Springs to help break the hold of mob boss Owney Maddox on the city, Earl, assisted by his team of "Jayhawkers," raids several casinos and whorehouses. He is unaware that he's being betrayed by elements within his unit and by outside forces he thought were on his side. Meanwhile, Earl's personal life is in tattersDhis wife is suffering through a perilous pregnancy and he can barely go a minute without mulling over his wartime sins. And he can't stop thinking back on life with his cruel, enigmatic father, his drunken mother, and his helpless younger brother, who committed suicide at 15 to escape it all. Hunter, a film critic for the Washington Post, has written a powerful, sweeping story, one that effectively deals with multiple themes: the anguish of war vets, deep-seated racism, and fairness and duty in personal and professional life. His prose, including some wonderful stretches of backwoods dialect and gritty scenes of physical and emotional turmoil, has that rare visual quality that takes the action off the page and into the mind. Agent, Esther Newberg at ICM. 200,000 first printing; optioned for film by Miramax; 8-city author tour. (July) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Earl Swagger returns from World War II with the medals of a hero and the moral exhaustion of a man who has seen and done too many unthinkable things, and is recruited for a different kind of war: cleaning up a corrupt gambling town in his home state of Arkansas. The bad guys, no-tably casino-czar Owney Maddox and visit-ing bigwig Bugsy Siegel, wear pricey suits and drive fancy cars, but they are just as dangerous as the enemy in the South Pacific and almost as well armed. Earl trains a small band of untried lawmen and leads them into battle for moral possession of the town. While the story is action-packed, it's the background that keeps it from being just another shoot-'em-up. Earl is haunted by both his future and his past. While he fights the good fight, his lonely wife awaits the birth of their son, who will grow up to be the hero of Hunter's earlier Swagger books. And he can't escape the ghosts of a brother who killed himself and a lawman father who was mysteriously murdered just before he left for the war. The interweaving of past and present intensifies the plot and reveals Earl as a multifaceted hero, in contrast to the stock characters who surround him. Readers who find violence exciting will get their fill, but they will also see that the scars it leaves may never heal, and that winning the war may be just the start of the battle.-Jan Tarasovic, West Springfield High School, Fairfax County, VACopyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Readers familiar with the exploits of Bob Lee Swagger (e.g., Time To Hunt, Black Light) will delight in this prequel featuring Earl Swagger, Bob Lee's father. At the end of World War II, Hot Springs, AK, is a wide-open town, where gambling, prostitution, liquor, and drugs are readily available, compliments of the syndicate. When Earl Swagger returns home from an extended tour of duty in the Marine Corps, Fred C. Becker, prosecuting attorney of Garland County, hires him and a retired FBI agent to train a team of special agents to clean up Hot Springs. The cleanup operation quickly escalates into a series of bloody battles between special agents and hired gunmen, including a hit team from New York. Becker, whose political career is in jeopardy, tries unsuccessfully to end the conflict, which plays out to its logical conclusion. Loosely based on a historical event called the Veterans' Revolt, this is an action-packed, cops-and-gangsters tale with larger-than-life characters and a thrill on every page. Recommended for all public libraries.-AThomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale Lib. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, John D. Thomas
...smart character development and a twisting subplot.


From AudioFile
Earl Swaggert, decorated WWII Marine, is rescued from his suicidal thoughts and heavy drinking when he is asked to train a special cadre of young law enforcement officers to clean up the gangster-run city of Hot Springs. The plot has plenty of action and is replete with enough twists and turns to keep the listener intrigued until the final moments. Bill Dufris is outstanding in his portrayal of Marines, Southerners, New York gangsters, and sexy hot babes. He uses tempo well as he quickens the pace when the tension and action build, and he wisely lets the story carry the drama. Dufris's performance actually enhances the writing. The only weakness is in the voice of Owney Maddox, a New York gangster who sports a fake English accent, mannerisms, and dress for his public persona. Dufris's portrayal of Maddox is not up to those of the other characters and lacks consistency. S.S.R. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Not many of today's writers write authentic hard-boiled prose, the kind Dashiell Hammett wrote in Red Harvest, in which an army of private detectives and hired gunmen clean up a graft-infected mining town called Poisonville. There's a lot of shooting in Red Harvest and books like it--men who love guns and love using them, killing each other over a squabble that is finally less important than the gunplay itself. Modern sensibilities get ruffled over this sort of thing, naturally, leaving the hard-boiled style without the substance. Not so in Hunter's new novel, a reimagining of Red Harvest, set in 1946, in which a World War II hero is hired to help clean up Hot Springs, Arkansas, where gangster Owney Madden has created a vacation wonderland for bad guys--casinos, whorehouses, and if you choose, a dip in the springs themselves. Earl Swagger is recruited by an ambitious district attorney with his eyes on the governor's mansion to train a commando unit that will destroy Madden's empire and restore Hot Springs to the mainstream. Struggling with his own inner demons (the warrior reentering polite society), Earl jumps at the chance to do the only thing he does well: kill people. But what about his pregnant wife and her dreams of domestic life? Earl wants that, too, but what he really needs is the " hot pounding of the gun, the furious intensity of it all." Hunter lets out all the stops here, stooping to heavy-handed melodrama on occasion (the subplot about Earl's abusive father), but it's hard to resist the sheer force of the narrative. This is a violent book about the allure of violence, and it pulls all the archetypal strings that Hammett pulled and that the best westerns have always pulled. (Imagine Earl Swagger as a descendant of Clint Eastwood in The Unforgiven.) Hunter's uncluttered prose, like Hammett's, draws power from the no-nonsense precision with which it describes the action and the hardware that propels it. Yes, we're far more comfortable today with the trappings of the hard-boiled style than with the real thing. Hunter shows us why. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Publishers Weekly (starred review) Brilliant...His prose has that rare visual quality that takes the action off the page and into the mind....Furnished with brilliant period detail and a dynamo of a lead character, this big, brawny crime drama recountsin highly fictionalized formthe true story of the backlash against corruption and decadence in Hot Springs, Arkansas, during the years following World War II....Hunter has written a powerful, sweeping story, one that effectively deals with multiple themes: the anguish of war vets, deep-seated racism, and fairness and duty in personal and professional life.


Book Description
In the summer of 1946, the most wide-open town in America is Hot Springs, Arkansas, a city of ancient, legendary corruption. While the pilgrims take the cure in the mineral-rich 142-degree water that bubbles from the earth, the brothels and casinos are the true source of the town's prosperity. It is run by an English-born gangster named Owney Maddox, who represents the New York syndicate and rules his empire like a Saxon lord while sporting an ascot and jodhpurs.But it is all about to be challenged. A newly elected county prosecutor wants to save the city's soul (he also wouldn't mind being the next governor). He begins a war on the gambling interests and, knowing it will be a long and bloody battle, hires an ex-Marine sergeant, Earl Swagger, who won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima, to run it. Swagger knows how to fight with guns as well as any man in the world. But he is haunted: the savage fighting he just barely survived and the men he left behind in the Pacific still shadow his mind, leaving a terrible melancholy. There are even darker memories: a murdered father who beat him mercilessly and drove a younger brother to suicide. He's also torn by his own impending fatherhood, as his wife, Junie, nears term. It isn't that Earl Swagger is afraid of dying; more scary still, it's possible that he yearns for it.The gangsters fight back, setting up a campaign of ambush and counterambush in the brothels, casinos and alleys of the City of the Vapors. Raids erupt into all-out combat amid screaming prostitutes and fleeing johns. Meanwhile, the body count mounts.


About the Author
Bestselling author Stephen Hunter, film critic for The Washington Post and winner of the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Distinguished Writing in Criticism (1998), has written ten novels, including Time to Hunt, Black Light and Point of Impact.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Our Review
Stephen Hunter is the reigning master of the hard-edged, ultraviolent thriller. The best of his novels -- which, to my mind, include Point of Impact, Dirty White Boys, and The Day Before Midnight -- combine technical expertise, headlong narrative momentum, and an extraordinary sense of detail, which create indelible portraits of larger-than-life men who live -- and often die -- by the gun.

Hunter's latest, Hot Springs, is a period thriller set in the postwar boom town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, a corrupt, wide-open city known for the medicinal effects of its eponymous springs, and for its free and easy tolerance of gambling, prostitution, and illicit pleasures of every sort. The narrative opens in 1946 when Fred C. Becker, a newly elected prosecuting attorney, inaugurates a much-publicized crusade to clean up the city. Becker, a sleazy opportunist with grandiose ambitions, hires two highly qualified professionals to supervise his crusade. One is D. A. Parker, a legendary former FBI agent who once shot it out with Baby Face Nelson and the Barker Gang. The other is former Marine Master Sergeant Earl Swagger, a Medal of Honor winner whose tragic history forms the centerpiece of Black Light and who will go on to father Hunter's most enduring fictional creation: Bob Lee Swagger, known to readers of Point of Impact as Bob the Nailer.

Together, Earl and Parker assemble and train an elite cadre of volunteers -- youthful law officers from various parts of the country. Once out of "boot camp" -- an intensive period of training in weaponry and military assault tactics -- the volunteers, led by Earl, launch a series of increasingly violent raids against the gambling establishments of Owney Maddox, a former New York mobster who has transformed Hot Springs into his own private fiefdom. The conflict between Earl Swagger's raiders -- latter-day embodiments of the Jayhawkers of post-Civil War Kansas -- and Maddox, whose troops include a savage tribe of Arkansas hillbillies known as the Grumleys, rapidly escalates into a small-scale war. As the war progresses, casualties mount on both sides, reaching their peak in a pair of spectacular, vividly described set pieces: a fierce pitched battle in a local black brothel and a nocturnal massacre in a Hot Springs railroad yard. Eventually, both the novel and the war culminate in a primal confrontation in the Arkansas woods, a confrontation that can only end with a single man left standing.

Hot Springs is a big, broad-shouldered narrative that offers a generous display of Stephen Hunter's characteristic virtues. The action sequences are, as always, crisply written, carefully constructed, and absolutely authentic. Hunter's portrait of 1940s Arkansas, with its farms and tenements, its bathhouses and bookie joints, is evocative and convincing. The characters -- most of them imaginary, many of them drawn from life -- are consistently credible. Included among them are an ambitious, embittered turncoat named Frenchy Short; the assorted members of the savage -- and inbred -- Grumley clan; the crusty veteran gunfighter, D. A. Parker; an imported Irish hit man named Johnny Spanish; and the aptly named Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, whose visit to Hot Springs provides him with the template for a gambler's paradise that will eventually be called Las Vegas.

But the real heart of Hot Springs, the still point around which every other every other element revolves, is Earl Swagger, a mournful, melancholy figure with a complex history and a superhuman affinity for the requirements of warfare. Hunter's exploration of Swagger's character and of the forces -- chief among them a violent, abusive, unforgiving father -- that helped create that character, give this novel its emotional and psychological depth, lifting it well above the level of its more generic competitors. Readers already familiar with the ongoing saga of the Swagger family -- a family marked by tragedy and by an innate propensity for violence -- will find this latest installment both revelatory and irresistible. Newcomers will find it a self-contained -- and perfectly acceptable -- starting point. Hot Springs is Stephen Hunter at the top of his considerable form. Popular entertainment rarely gets much better, or more viscerally exciting, than this.

--Bill Sheehan

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In the summer of 1946, the most wide-open town in America is Hot Springs, Arkansas, a city of ancient, legendary corruption. While the pilgrims take the cure in the mineral-rich 142-degree water that bubbles from the earth, the brothels and casinos are the true source of the town's prosperity. It is run by an English-born gangster named Owney Maddox, who represents the New York syndicate and rules his empire like a Saxon lord while sporting an ascot and jodhpurs." "But it is all about to be challenged. A newly elected county prosecutor wants to take on the big boys and save the city's soul (he also wouldn't mind being the next governor). He begins a war on the gambling interests and, knowing the war will be long and bloody, hires an ex-Marine sergeant, Earl Swagger, who won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima, to run it. Swagger knows how to fight with guns as well as any man in the world. But he is haunted: the savage fighting he just barely survived and the men he left behind in the Pacific still shadow his mind, leaving a terrible melancholy. There are even darker memories: a murdered father who beat him mercilessly and drove a younger brother to suicide. And he's torn by his own impending fatherhood, as his wife, Junie, nears term. It isn't that Earl Swagger is afraid of dying; more scary still, it's possible that he yearns for it.

FROM THE CRITICS

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

This work by best-selling author Hunter is a "real man's book." Set in Arkansas in the 1940s, the golden age of organized crime, it's at once relentlessly violent and deeply touching, with "very interesting characters." "Who needs Superman?" The main character, Earl, "makes John Wayne look like a wuss." However, some thought "it went on too long." "A good beach read if you're lacking a boogie board."

Publishers Weekly

Furnished with brilliant period detail and a dynamo of a lead character, this big, brawny crime drama recounts--in highly fictionalized form--the true story of the backlash against corruption and decadence in Hot Springs, Ark., during the years following WWII. Bobby Lee Swagger, the Vietnam vet hero of three of Hunter's previous books (most recently, Time to Hunt), is here supplanted as protagonist by his father. Earl Swagger, a fierce, highly decorated WWII Pacific theater warrior, is a man haunted by the horrors of war, as well as by the abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his brutal father. Recruited by the district attorney in Hot Springs to help break the hold of mob boss Owney Maddox on the city, Earl, assisted by his team of "Jayhawkers," raids several casinos and whorehouses. He is unaware that he's being betrayed by elements within his unit and by outside forces he thought were on his side. Meanwhile, Earl's personal life is in tatters--his wife is suffering through a perilous pregnancy and he can barely go a minute without mulling over his wartime sins. And he can't stop thinking back on life with his cruel, enigmatic father, his drunken mother, and his helpless younger brother, who committed suicide at 15 to escape it all. Hunter, a film critic for the Washington Post, has written a powerful, sweeping story, one that effectively deals with multiple themes: the anguish of war vets, deep-seated racism, and fairness and duty in personal and professional life. His prose, including some wonderful stretches of backwoods dialect and gritty scenes of physical and emotional turmoil, has that rare visual quality that takes the action off the page and into the mind. Agent, Esther Newberg at ICM. 200,000 first printing; optioned for film by Miramax; 8-city author tour. (July) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

It's 1946, and corruption is flourishing in Hot Springs, AR. Visitors flock there to bathe in the mineral-rich waters, but it's prostitution and gambling that bring prosperity to the mobsters who run the town. Newly elected county prosecutor Fred C. Becker thinks that cleaning up Hot Springs is his ticket to a higher office and recruits decorated World War II marine Earl Swagger, father of Hunter's recurring character Bob Lee Swagger, to run the operation. Swagger, assisted by his well-trained "Jayhawkers," raids several casinos and brothels before a disgraced Jayhawker helps the mob ambush Swagger's team. Becker pulls the plug on the violent operation, but Swagger refuses to give up the fight and instead takes the mobsters on single-handedly. The excellent narration by Jay O. Sanders smooths out the choppy abridgment, and, with film rights already sold to Miramax, this engaging thriller is a sure bet for public libraries.--Beth Farrell, Portage Cty. Dist. Lib., OH Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Earl Swagger returns from World War II with the medals of a hero and the moral exhaustion of a man who has seen and done too many unthinkable things, and is recruited for a different kind of war: cleaning up a corrupt gambling town in his home state of Arkansas. The bad guys, no-tably casino-czar Owney Maddox and visit-ing bigwig Bugsy Siegel, wear pricey suits and drive fancy cars, but they are just as dangerous as the enemy in the South Pacific and almost as well armed. Earl trains a small band of untried lawmen and leads them into battle for moral possession of the town. While the story is action-packed, it's the background that keeps it from being just another shoot-'em-up. Earl is haunted by both his future and his past. While he fights the good fight, his lonely wife awaits the birth of their son, who will grow up to be the hero of Hunter's earlier Swagger books. And he can't escape the ghosts of a brother who killed himself and a lawman father who was mysteriously murdered just before he left for the war. The interweaving of past and present intensifies the plot and reveals Earl as a multifaceted hero, in contrast to the stock characters who surround him. Readers who find violence exciting will get their fill, but they will also see that the scars it leaves may never heal, and that winning the war may be just the start of the battle.-Jan Tarasovic, West Springfield High School, Fairfax County, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

AudioFile