Havana: A Swagger Family Novel (Earl Swagger)

Rating:
Summary: Trying to hard
Review: I've been reading Hunter for years and this is the first time I've been disappointed by one of his books. There's just to much cute about the characters and what they say and do. I especially found Short and Speshnev to be below his usual standards. As a film critic Hunter should know better then to write about "B Movie" characters. Most appalling was his portrayal of Meyer Lansky. Meyer was a gangster, not some ones
wise old granddad. (Note to SH.. Lansky would never call anyone a "schmata" a rag, he'd call him a "gonif" which is a crook.)
It was a poor end for a great series.

Rating:
Summary: Third Earl Swagger Novel is okay, but Not the Best of them
Review: After "Hot Springs" and especially after "Pale Horse Coming" I couldn't wait to get a look at the latest of the Earl Swagger novels, "Havana." Unfortunately though, Hunter just didn't deliver in this third installment. In the back of the book, Stephen Hunter acknowledges that A) he was struggling to write this next novel and B) the idea to send Earl to Havana was not his idea. Personally, I believe this shows through in places. At times it almost seemed that Earl didn't fit in with the plot, was kind of made to fit even. Yes, the gunfights and such persist. We even see Earl in the role of "sniper" (see Hunter's incredible book "Point of Impact" for a great sniper novel) but it's not enough to win over a tried and true Stephen Hunter fan. Hunter has done better. The good points though are the return of Frenchy Short, a great character from the first Earl novel, "Hot Springs." The setting for pre-Castro Cuba and the interesting historical twist of including Fidel as a key character are also well done. Unfortunately, Hunter seems to get too caught up with these other characters and misses the fact that it's our hero Earl that we've come to hear about.

Rating:
Summary: A little dull and predictable
Review: Not Hunter's best work by far. It seemed to be a book with no purpose. The life of Earl Swagger didn't change much due to the actions taken in the book and you feel as though the whole book ought not to have happened at all. Disappointing.

Rating:
Summary: The law of diminishing returns
Review: Hunter squeezed another Earl story out of the limited timeline he'd constructed for himself, and this one feels contrived. There is still a good amount of enjoyable stuff. The set piece where Earl senses danger and avoids a trap has the excitement of the better efforts in the series. Some of the minor characters are well-drawn too, such as Roger the ineffectual pretty-boy Harvard man.

But I've had enough of the technical gun business, and another annoying aspect for me was the sloppiness in little things. Frankie talks one way when he's first introduced and then another later on. Another minor character starts as a Yale man, then later he's Harvard. And there was an awful lot of misspelling that the editors could/should have caught.

I ripped through it on a plane and then left it behind.

Rating:
Summary: A good adventure thriller set in 1950s Cuba
Review: This is a good one. Besides Hunter's continuation of the Swagger family history, a plus in itself, it is also replete with historical and semi-historical material which brought back memories. In one incident, Gunter sort of "took a shot" at Papa Hemingway--made him out to be a drunken boor--and maybe he was, but I loved Hemingway's writing, and thought better of him. It reminded me a little of what Steinbeck did to the memory of Doc Ricketts, in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. Ir made Steinbeck very unpopular with the people in the MOnterey area that I knew who knew and admired Ricketts.

But, all this is really beside the point: if you are writing about that period in Cuba, and you leave out Castro and Trujillo, you may as well have written about Long Island. He works them in nicely--especially Fidel.

So, this is another great novel from the mind of Stephen Hunter. It is well-written, as are they all, and entertaining, exciting, suspensefull, and makes you come back for more.

Very good. even if he does knock the Navy from time to time.

Joseph (Joe) Pierre, USN (Ret)

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I am a huge Stephen Hunter fan but 'Havana' was a big disappointment. It should have been called 'A Book-Too-Far'.

Rating:
Summary: Trying to hard
Review: I've been reading Hunter for years and this is the first time I've been disappointed by one of his books. There's just to much cute about the characters and what they say and do. I especially found Short and Speshnev to be below his usual standards. As a film critic Hunter should know better then to write about "B Movie" characters. Most appalling was his portrayal of Meyer Lansky. Meyer was a gangster, not some ones
wise old granddad. (Note to SH.. Lansky would never call anyone a "schmata" a rag, he'd call him a "gonif" which is a crook.)
It was a poor end for a great series.