The Third Bullet: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel

“Ever since Swagger’s first appearance in Point of Impact (1993), the author has provided his hero with antagonists worthy of the name. Meachum is a cut above the usual . . .”

In eight novels pitting retired Marine marksman Bob Lee Swagger against villains who have used his beloved craft with malicious intent, Stephen Hunter has established his AARP-aged hero as the world's foremost authority on death-by-sniper.

It seems inevitable, therefore, that he eventually push the battered, cranky, and antisocial Swagger into a reluctant investigation of the most infamous assassination of our time: the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. With that same inevitability, author and fictional creation have arrived at a conclusion that seems both original and reasonably credible.

Why only “reasonably” credible? Because, although President Kennedy's death is a painful fact, the book is fiction and Mr. Hunter, as adept at spinning a yarn as Swagger is at hitting a bull’s-eye, has had the freedom to not only theorize, but also to create characters and situations designed to answer most of the questions raised by skeptics over the years.

This transparency permits his clever, smartly constructed, and well-researched plot to fit the known bits and pieces of what happened on that dark day in Dallas into a completed jigsaw puzzle that shows readers precisely why the crime was committed—and who did it.

No big surprise: It’s not Lee Harvey Oswald.

Swagger is drawn to the very cold case by the widow of a Baltimore writer named James Aptapton, a recent hit-and-run victim who’d been planning a book about the assassination.

She believes her husband’s death was not an accident and that it had something to do with an object his research had uncovered: a gun-oil-stained topcoat that had long been hidden in a building near the Texas Book Depository where Oswald supposedly had taken his fatal shot.

The gruff ex-marine, who’d been more or less satisfied with the Warren Commission’s report, initially is unimpressed by the possibility of another firearm in the vicinity of the Book Depository.

“The thing you missed is Texas,” he tells the widow. “Texas is gun country. You may have to explain why you have a gun in Baltimore, but you sure don’t in Texas. Everyone has a gun in Texas.”

Still, there’s something about the coat that intrigues him enough to peruse Aptapton’s notes.

Before long, he’s off to Dallas, poking about the “crime scene,” tracing Oswald’s movements, and catching up on conspiracy theories. “The stuff felt like an undertow; it could suck you in and in minutes you were annealed into the gel of conspiracy, your clarity gone, your logic-gyro hopelessly out of whack, your ability to distinguish this from that eroded into nothingness.”

More travel ensues—to and from Russia and across this country—with Swagger continuing to sort through the morass of conspiracy theories while dodging hitmen sent his way by the mastermind who planned the assassination.

The latter is identified halfway through the novel: a retired CIA case officer named Hugh Meachum. That accomplished, Mr. Hunter begins a dual narrative, interrupting Swagger’s perilous progress with Meachum’s memoirs, including his first person account of the events leading up to, during, and after the fatal shooting in Dallas.

Ever since Swagger’s first appearance in Point of Impact (1993), the author has provided his hero with antagonists worthy of the name. Meachum is a cut above the usual, not merely aristocratic, arrogant, powerful and resourceful, but unexpectedly humane, at times whimsical and sentimental and, for much of the book, surprisingly compassionate—especially when considering the enormity of his crime. In short, to modify the Tom Wolfe title, he is a villain in full.

Also distinguishing The Third Bullet from earlier Swagger adventures are its moments of literary playfulness. The oddly named, deceased author Aptapton, for example, is described as “a minor local journo celeb, who'd gone on to minor fame as a writer for money of hardcover books about gunfights and the stoic heroes who won them . . .”

Mr. Hunter was himself something of a local journo—the film critic of the Baltimore Sun—when he published his early novels about, well, gunfights and stoic heroes.

He also has a theorist bend Swagger’s ear with an imaginative scenario of what might have happened if President Kennedy had survived. The early part of the scenario bears some relevance to the plot, but the tale soon veers off into a woozy time travel story not unlike Stephen King’s 11/22/63.

This little plot detour is no doubt intended as an amusing acknowledgement of Mr. King’s well received, bestselling take on the assassination. But purposefully or not, it also makes the point that a fantasy spin applied to an historic event—however creative and satisfying the result—is no match for a solid, earth bound approach like this one that stays within the parameters imposed by real world credibility.