Product Description

The Year is 1951. A smooth-talking Chicago lawyer has come to chat with Sam Vincent, a former prosecutor, about a dangerous unknown - a prison for violent black convicts in Thebes, Mississippi, a place of many questions but no answers. Would Sam, a white man and a Southerner, be willing to investigate? When Sam vanishes in the mists and swamps, his old friend Earl Swagger packs his gun and heads to Thebes where he discovers sinister secrets that go far beyond the prison walls. The whole town guards itself from nosy strangers with a private army of brutal, gun-toting, Klan-type thugs and rednecks. After barely escaping, Earl vows to right things and reclaim Thebes from the throes of a sinister conspiracy. But first, he enlists just a little help from his friends. Featuring the same fast-paced action and page-turning thrills that made Hot Springs a heart-stopping bestseller, Pale Horse Coming is a triumphant successor.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #581145 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Review
Earl Swagger is back in the follow-up to the bestselling Hot Springs.

John Sandford
Stephen Hunter is an Elmore Leonard on steroids.

Independent on Sunday on Hunter's Hot Springs
Stories of passion, guilt and redemption that jump right off the page and smack the reader clean between the eyes.

Customer Reviews

A hero for all time
This is, quite simply, a tremendous thriller. The novels by Stephen Hunter featuring Earl Swagger and his son Bob Lee are the most exciting being written today. Their publication is an event. Earl and Bob Lee have a solidity and total integrity that inspires. You would go through any door, no matter what might lie behind it, with one of them behind you. You feel deeply for Earl's suffering at the hands of evil in the centre part of this novel, but you are carried along in the full knowledge that Earl is going to survive all the odds and come back, and you feel sorry for those who torment him and don't know yet that the pale horse will come and what the consequences for them will be. This novel is better than "Hot Springs", its predecessor, and very well in the same top drawer class as "Dirty White Boys" and the magnificent "Time to Hunt", both tour de forces by Stephen Hunter. Those who have yet to read "Pale Horse Coming" have a treat in store.

Earl Swagger - A True American Hero?
You think Camp X-Ray is tough, wait till you read about Thebes. Southern lawyer Sam Vincent goes into the backwoods on a simple legal matter and ends up in a world of trouble. Earl Swagger comes to his rescue, and unearths a conspiracy of evil; and it takes a man of Earl Swagger's stature and ability to deal with it. Another great page-turner from Stephen Hunter.

OK Corral relocated to Mississippi
PALE HORSE COMING is inspired by the New Testament verse:

"Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him." Author Stephen Hunter must have thought the passage way cool because he milks it for all it's worth.

Earl Swagger, the novel's hero, is a sergeant in the Arkansas state police and a Marine veteran of the Pacific war against the Japanese. It's now 1961, and Earl takes time off from his day job to investigate the disappearance of a lawyer pal who's traveled on legal business to the Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored), a Mississippi prison for Negroes cut-off from the rest of the world in the swamps of the state's southeast corner. What Swagger discovers is a hell-hole of officially sanctioned viciousness that makes Stalin's gulags seem tame by comparison. As a meddling outsider, Earl is detained there himself and almost loses his life and sanity. After finally escaping, he returns to exact righteous vengeance.

The first half of PALE HORSE COMING is perhaps its best. It's the survival story of Earl amidst the horrors of Thebes, not the least of which is the psychopathic overseer, the albino Bigboy, who enjoys torturing prisoners to death with a bullwhip. To enhance the dramatic effect of Swagger's fight for his life, the Thebes facility is perhaps overembellished. Wrought in iron over its main gate are the words, "Work Will Set You Free." Haven't we seen that before, as in "Arbeit Macht Frei", associated with other camps of infamy? Somehow.

The book's second half strains credulity. The author apparently has a love of the Old West as he has Earl returning to Thebes with a posse of retired gunslingers - one of whom is in his eighties - to expunge the place from the map. Swagger includes in his trigger-happy band a character named Audie Ryan, America's most decorated WWII soldier and now a movie star, who's obviously modeled on the real-life Audie Murphy. Oh, puhleeze! And it doesn't help that the U.S. government is involved with Thebes in the obligatory Sinister Secret Project - your tax dollars at work.

Had I thought that Hunter wrote the ending tongue-in-cheek as a parody, I might have been more forgiving. However, I suspect he was serious, and the result is too clever by half. As it is, I'm awarding four stars because it remains a gripping and entertaining read. And that's why I spend good money for a cheap thriller, right?

In the film PALE RIDER, which reworks the earlier SHANE with a stronger "Death rides a pale horse" theme, Clint Eastwood's Man-With-No-Name character wipes out the Bad Guys all by himself. For me, the Lone Hero has always held more appeal.