TARGETED

Trouble finds retired sniper Bob Lee Swagger in this rip-roaring, blood-spilling, right-wing rant.

The opening feels like a zombie novel, portraying northern New Jersey as a “slough of despond” with “three-foot-long bull crickets,” the fragrance of “large, dead Italians,” and a landscape with “a wondrous satanic cast.” (Ha ha. Take that, Garden State!) Bad guys hijack a truck and leave corpses behind, but they fail to kill the warrior elite hero named Delta. Meanwhile in Idaho, the septuagenarian Bob Lee Swagger mends in peace from a near-fatal wound until bad news arrives: Congress will hold a hearing in Boise into whether retired Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. Swagger had used unauthorized ammo in taking out Juba the Sniper. “Policemen must be prepared to retreat rather than return fire,” one pol pontificates. Apparently, some candy-ass congressmen hate guns and killing and stuff, and they want to find a way to bring down Swagger, the great American hero. “Even heroes have to be held accountable for their decisions,” a senator says. The cartoonish Congresswoman Charlotte Venable hates Swagger, the president’s favorite sniper. The author takes plenty of cheap, lib-owning political shots, as when Delta likens his situation to bathing in pain, breathing sulfur fumes, and listening to the wisdom of Stephen Colbert in stereo. A New York Times reporter has a mouth that looks like a vagina and is “your basic child-molester type of anonymous wretch.” The poor guy’s hair “fell like shit from a flock of diarrhetic geese.” Another reporter is a “CNN haircut eunuch.” The aforementioned crims storm the hearing, planning to take eight congressmen hostage. (It must take place in Idaho because who would ever attack the U.S. Capitol?) Bloody mayhem ensues, with an ingenious sequence involving a wheelchair that does Swagger proud. A neat subplot reaches back to the American Revolution and asks whether he is destined by his DNA to be a natural-born killer. Politics aside, were that possible, Swagger’s adventures are escapist fun. Just watch out when the geezer turns 80!

There’s a dumpster’s worth of action and attitude here.