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Summary
Summary
When a railroad engineer is shot dead, and it is determined that the bullet came from a sniper's rifle more than six hundred yards away, all eyes turn on Deputy Sheriff P. A. Pennington as a suspect. Pennington-the man who solved the Wheat Field murders-is by far the best marksman in town, and had been an Army Ranger sniper in the war. When the engineer's young and sexy wife is shot dead days later, he realizes that his worst nightmare is about to begin.
During the war, Nazi SS Colonel Christian Wolfgang Stangl-known as "the Wolf"-controlled the narrow mountain railroad pass in the Bavarian Alps used to ship millions of dollars in gold and war loot. Pennington had been sent on a suicide mission to shut down the pass-but the Wolf got away. Now it appears as if the Wolf is at his door.
Author Notes
Steve Thayer was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on March 23, 1953. He graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena, California in 1976. He started writing his first book, Saint Mudd, in 1982. His other works include The Weatherman and Wheat Field.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Thayer brings back Deputy Sheriff P.A. Pennington of Kickapoo County, Wis. (hero of last year's The Wheat Field), who singlehandedly solves a set of sniper murders in which he is the chief suspect. The thriller is set in 1962, when Pennington is running for sheriff. As a Catholic, he meets with a good deal of suspicion from his largely Protestant electorate. That suspicion gets new focus when the double murder of a railway engineer and his wife disrupts the campaign, as the wife is a former lover of Pennington's. The engineer is shot at long range, and Pennington, a brilliant sharpshooter during WWII, is the obvious suspect in both murders. Yet he has a strong hunch about the real identity of the killer: former SS officer Col. Wolfgang Stangl. During the war, Pennington had escaped from a prison camp that Stangl directed. Now, Pennington believes, Stangl has come to the U.S. to set him up in a complicated revenge plot-and, what's worse, Stangl seems to be plotting to assassinate President Kennedy. Needless to say, Kickapoo law enforcement finds this story a bit far-fetched. But Pennington has a comely female Scotland Yard detective on his side, who mysteriously shows up in Kickapoo to help him out with the case. Their attempts to unveil Stangl bring the novel to a stunning climax. This fast-paced, sexy suspense novel also offers a snapshot of postwar ethnic and social rivalries in the bucolic fictional Wisconsin county. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Renegade SS officer exacts vengeance on the cop who gave him so much trouble during the war. Leaving his earlier Twin Cities settings, Thayer (Saint Mudd, 1992, etc.) returns to little Kickapoo Falls, Wisconsin, and to Deputy Pennington, the WWII sniper who starred in Wheat Field (2002). It's now 1963, and Pennington is running for sheriff--tricky, given that he's a Catholic in an overwhelmingly Protestant region and also that he drags more than a few rumors behind him--just as a sniper takes out two local residents. The first is a railway engineer, shot in his train from such a distance that sharpshooter Pennington is the prime suspect. Next is the engineer's wife, a lonely beauty who used to invite Pennington over for canoodling (also tricky, since Pennington has been unable to, well, function since the war). Though he takes his sweet time saying so, Pennington is sure who the shooter is: Colonel Wolfgang Stangl. Your prototypic aristocrat SS sadist, Stangl imprisoned Pennington after he'd been parachuted into Germany to wreak some havoc with his sniper rifle on the critical rail junction of Wolf Pass (his first kill was an engineer on a train), which was under Stangl's purview. Nobody, of course, believes that an SS killer is really stalking Pennington, especially not his opponent in the sheriff's race, who's backed by the Gunn Club and its wealthy German-American--and Nazi-sympathetic--followers. Add to all this the gorgeous female Scotland Yard inspector who shows up to help Pennington, and Pennington's suspicion that Stangl is leading up to an assassination attempt on President Kennedy, with whom Pennington is soon to attend a Mass in St. Paul. Thayer puts his usual mix of whipcrack pacing and sexual obsession ("It seems like all the women in Kickapoo County had big tits") to fine use in this local noir. Well-researched, violent as always: an excellent addition to what's becoming a promising series of thrillers. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.