The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter

Things aren’t always what they seem . . . even 50 years later.

Our boy Bob Lee Swagger is living the ‘retired’ life in the backwoods of Idaho. Occasionally he ventures to the local greasy spoon for a hot breakfast. For nigh on a month, this woman has been coming to the diner in the hopes of meeting up with the reclusive and infamous sniper. After some initial jousting, he agrees to hear her tale.

Her husband, a Baltimore reporter and occasional author, was run down while walking on a city street. No question he was targeted, but the local cops are stumped. She heard about Swagger from the friend of a friend of a friend and decided to go to Idaho and wait him out.

Her husband was working on a new angle to the Kennedy assassination and was close to having enough information to take a proposal to a publisher. The key piece of evidence was the uncovering of an overcoat stuffed amongst some ratty old carpeting on some makeshift shelves all behind the non-functioning HVAC machinery on the roof of the Dal-Tex bldg, which stands smack dab next to the Texas School Book Depository.

That in and of itself wasn’t enough to wet Swagger’s whistle. It was a stain across the back of the coat – what resembled a bicycle tire – that’s what raised Bob Lee’s eyebrows. So much so that he sets off for Dallas.

While in Dallas, he meets up with this Kennedy nerd who runs the Assassination Museum, a guy with an encyclopedic memory about Nov 22, 1963 and anything connected. Together they work out a theory of the shooter. Make that ‘shooters’.

From what Bob Lee had read about Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO for the true conspiracy nuts), young LHO had neither the smarts, the guile, nor the necessary skill to be successful. There had to be another shooter who was far more reliable and he had to be positioned in roughly a parallel angle to what LHO had in the Depository. LHO was a patsy from the get-go, nothing more. Anybody he hit would be icing on the cake. Enter the Dal-Tex bldg. next door.

So now Bob Lee is peeling back the onion in Dallas, Baltimore, rural Virginia, North Carolina, Connecticut and elsewhere as he puts his theory together, but not before fending off the murder-by-car driver with extreme prejudice. Timing has always been an issue. LHO didn't get the book job until sometime in Sept-Oct and the motorcade route wasn't announced until about Nov 20. How could someone have convinced LHO to take the shots, get the rifle into the bldg, arrange for a 2nd (and far better) shooter in the bldg next door and actually get away with it all in that time frame? Being so unbelievable, most assumed (TWC included - The Warren Commission) that LHO had to have acted alone.

Apparently Hunter had started this story quite some time ago, even before his Bob Lee character had come to life. The skeptic in me thinks that the timing of this book and the upcoming 50^th anniversary of 11/22/63 is more than a coincidence. While I love the Bob Lee character and will find it hard to not enjoy any book with him in the lead, this one started to wear on me from two fronts. First, about 2/3 of the way through, Hunter brings Swagger’s opponent’s backstory in as a mea culpa manuscript in preparation. This book-within-a-book presentation wore me down to the point where I was skipping large segments. Second, also in that last third of the book, Hunter reveals characters brought back from the dead (figuratively speaking) previously encountered in Point of Impact (the source material for the movie ‘Shooter’ – guess Hollywood took some creative license with these two characters in the movie). I kind of got lost in this ‘closing the circle’ gimmick. But the righteous ending for the Swagger’s nemesis and his hired thugs was a worthy finale, something only Bob Lee, even at 66yo, could muster.

East Coast Don