Stephen Hunter Books in Order

Set in the drought stricken Southwest of the 1890s, this Western traces aging Civil War veteran Jack Swagger as he hires on at the prosperous Callahan ranch, secretly investigates a young cowboy's suspicious death, and uncovers the violent machinery behind the spread's wealth.

In this novella from the Swagger cycle, Earl Swagger arrives in a Maryland company town built on tobacco money and is drawn into an old bank robbery case, digging into the Tapscott family's secrets and the long shadow cast by a getaway man called Johnny Tuesday.

Set in 1944, this Earl Swagger prequel sends the battle hardened Marine to Europe to track down an uncanny German sniper who is decimating Allied troops in Normandy's hedgerows, a mission that entangles him with London spies, traitors, and the politics of a global war.

Summoned before Congress to answer for a controversial counterterrorism mission, Bob ends up inside a packed hearing room when a well organized assault team storms the building, turning his hostile interrogators into hostages he has to keep alive with limited weapons and time.

In this brief profile, Hunter steps out from behind the curtain to explain how Bob Lee Swagger came to life, from the real Marine sniper who inspired him to the research, villains, and recurring themes that keep drawing the author back to the Nailer.

British Army captain and secret agent Basil St. Florian parachutes into Nazi occupied France to photograph pages from a rare religious pamphlet tied to a German code, dodging SS hunters and double agents in a brisk, pulpy homage to classic World War II espionage capers.

A grieving mother asks Bob to find the mercenary sniper who killed her son in Iraq, a hunt that leads from Israeli intelligence briefings to an American city where a fanatical shooter plans an ultra long range strike on a high value target.

When a hidden strongbox full of 1930s memorabilia turns up in Arkansas, Bob begins tracing the secret career of his grandfather, Charles Swagger, a gifted gunman who helped hunt bank robbers like Baby Face Nelson, and whose fall from grace still echoes.

In this Bibliomystery featuring Basil St. Florian, the dashing spy slips across the Channel to find and photograph a mysterious manuscript whose text hides a cipher that could save millions of lives, while German intelligence dogs his every move through occupied France.

This standalone thriller alternates the diary of a fictional Jack the Ripper with dispatches from Jeb, a hungry London newspaperman covering the murders in 1888, turning a familiar true crime story into an intimate duel between a killer and the man trying to name him.

This short thriller follows Stephen Longacre, a spoiled playboy whose wealthy father threatens to cut him off unless he takes on a serious, dangerous challenge, pushing him out of idle privilege and into a world of political unrest, hatred, and real consequence.

Reporter Kathy Reilly stumbles across a mention of Ludmilla "Mili" Petrova, a vanished Soviet sniper from World War II, and turns to Bob for help, sending them from Moscow archives to the Carpathian Mountains to learn why such a deadly woman was erased from history.

Obsessed with the ballistics of Dealey Plaza, Bob starts pulling at loose threads in the Kennedy assassination and finds gaps the official story cannot explain, drawing the attention of a modern conspiracy that has already killed to keep its version of history intact.

On Black Friday at America's largest mall, a dozen gunmen styling themselves on Mumbai terrorists shoot Santa and herd about a thousand shoppers into the central atrium, unaware that retired Marine sniper Ray Cruz is loose inside, hunting them from the shadows.

After a Marine sniper team is wiped out in Afghanistan, only Gunnery Sergeant Ray Cruz survives, determined to finish the mission himself even after their target becomes a prized American ally, while Bob is hired to stop the Cruise Missile before he fires again.

A string of long range assassinations of famous Vietnam era radicals seems to point to a legendary Marine sniper, but when the suspect dies in an apparent suicide, Bob is brought in to read the crime scenes and discovers a much more modern plot.

When investigative reporter Nikki Swagger is run off a mountain road near Bristol Motor Speedway, Bob heads to Tennessee, following clues through a fake prayer camp, moonshine country, and the high pressure world of NASCAR to stop a daring armored truck heist.

Bob agrees to return a sword Earl took on Iwo Jima to the son of the man Earl killed, a task that draws him to Tokyo, a priceless samurai blade, yakuza power struggles, and a final confrontation fought under ancient warrior rules.

Named for the shabby Illinois theater where he grew up watching B movies, this essay collection revisits a decade of Hunter's Washington Post criticism, celebrating genre pictures, unpacking Hollywood myths, and tracing how those childhood matinees shaped his view of film.

Teaming with historian John Bainbridge Jr., Hunter reconstructs the 1950 Blair House attack, when two Puerto Rican nationalists tried to assassinate President Truman, blending meticulous research with novelistic pacing to follow both the gunmen and the officers who stopped them.

Sent to Cuba in 1953 as bodyguard to an Arkansas politician, Earl finds himself amid mobbed up casinos, Batista's security forces, and a young firebrand named Fidel Castro, as US intelligence quietly presses him to solve a looming revolution with a sniper's bullet.

A worried Sam Vincent goes to investigate a brutal, almost off the map Mississippi prison farm for Black convicts and disappears, forcing Earl Swagger to slip into the swamp country around Thebes, peel back the town's secrets, and decide how far he will go to set things right.

In postwar 1946, Medal of Honor recipient Earl Swagger is recruited to clean up the mob run gambling and prostitution rackets in Hot Springs, Arkansas, training an elite squad of young cops for raids that quickly turn into pitched battles in smoky casinos.

Trying to live quietly with his wife Julie and daughter Nikki, Bob is dragged back into the past when a new attack suggests the Soviet sniper who wounded him in Vietnam is still alive, forcing him to relive the patrol where his spotter died.

Years after clearing his own name, Bob Lee Swagger teams up with writer Russ Pewtie to investigate the 1955 killing of his state trooper father Earl, uncovering buried racism, small town corruption, and a link to the brutal events of Dirty White Boys.

This nonfiction collection gathers Hunter's sharpest reviews and essays on violent cinema, from crime sagas and westerns to action blockbusters, probing why audiences are drawn to bloodshed on screen and how directors stage mayhem, from The Wild Bunch to Reservoir Dogs.

Violent convict Lamar Pye escapes an Oklahoma prison with his hulking cousin and an unstable cellmate, leaving a trail of blood across the Southwest, while state trooper Bud Pewtie, brave but flawed, risks his family and career to track them down.

Bob Lee Swagger, once one of the best Marine snipers in Vietnam, is lured out of isolation to help stop an assassination, then framed as the lone gunman and forced to outthink the conspiracy hunting him across the country.

A team of paramilitary extremists seizes a top secret MX missile silo in the Maryland mountains and kidnaps welder Jack Hummel to cut through a half ton titanium barrier, while a disgraced Delta Force veteran and a weapons engineer race to stop nuclear launch.

Based on the Cold War thriller film, this novel follows an emotionally distant father and his restless son on a frantic trip through Europe after their wife and mother vanishes in Paris, forcing the elder man to reveal the spy skills he has long hidden.

During the chaos of the Spanish Civil War, struggling young writer Robert Florry is sent by British intelligence to track down Julian Raines, a flamboyant English volunteer suspected of working for the Soviets, a mission complicated by old school resentments and new loyalties.

Years after a disastrous covert campaign to back Kurdish rebels, disgraced ex CIA man Paul Chardy is dragged back into the game when legendary fighter Ulu Beg surfaces in America, apparently bent on revenge against the statesman who ordered the betrayal.

In the final months of World War II, a German marksman named Repp prepares a last mission using an advanced sniper rifle that could change the course of the conflict, while a makeshift Allied team races to identify and stop him before he fires.