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    Soft Target
    Soft Target
    Soft Target
    Audiobook7 hours

    Soft Target

    Written by Stephen Hunter

    Narrated by Phil Gigante

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Ten thousand people jam the aisles, the corridors, the elevators, and the escalators of America, the Mall—a giant Rubik’s Cube of a structure with its own amusement park located in the spacious center atrium. Of those people, nine thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight have come to shop.

    The other twelve have come to kill.

    Ray Cruz, one of the heroes of Hunter’s last bestseller, Dead Zero, is in the mall with his fiancée and her family. The retired Marine sniper thought he was done with stalking and killing—but among the trapped thousands, he’s the only one with a plan and the guts to confront the self-proclaimed “Brigade Mumbai.” Now all he needs is a gun.

    FBI Sniper Dave McElroy has a gun. But positioned on the roof of the vast building and without explosives or fuses—or the go-ahead from his superiors—he is cut off from his targets and forced into the role of witness to the horror unfolding below.

    Having learned the lessons of Columbine, the feds believe that immediate action is the only solution. But Douglas Obobo, the charismatic and ambitious commandant of the state police, orders cooperation, tolerance, communication, and empathy for the gunmen. He feels that with his superior negotiating skills, he can make contact with the shooters and gently nudge them into surrender. But what if their goal all along has been unparalleled massacre—and they’re only waiting for prime time?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateDec 6, 2011
    ISBN9781441861191
    Soft Target
    Author

    Stephen Hunter

    Stephen Hunter has written over twenty novels. The retired chief film critic for The Washington Post, where he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, he has also published two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work, American Gunfight. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

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    Reviews for Soft Target

    3/5

    96 ratings9 reviews

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    • 2/5
      America the Mall?...give me a break. I bought this because I like thrillers and it took place at the Mall of America in Minnesota (I live in Minn). Disappointing.
    • 5/5
      I liked the plot line. It was a little all over the place but it had me going.
    • 5/5
      The mathematical detail honestly made this book for me. The characterization was good, the writing was wonderfully tense, but the thing I never forgot was all that sniper trig.A gloriously nerdy thriller.
    • 1/5
      Hunter was one of my favorite authors in the past. His Bob Lee Swagger series were great. I think he has lost his passion for story-telling, it seems like he is just phoning it in now, counting on his past reputation to sell books. This particular book was awful.
    • 1/5
      If I wanted to read right wing politics, I'd pick up Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck, etc., but not Stephen Hunter. Yet under the guise of a "thriller," we have Hunter's view of Obama and the left and it's not pretty. Int his tale of a Somali terrorist takeover of the Mall of America in Minnesota, where they kill people at random and have about 1,000 hostages, we have the beginnings of an interesting story. Until we get to Colonel Douglas Obobo. I'm not making that last name up. He's a charismatic black man, who has risen to the top of the Minnesota State Police without ever having fired a shot, through his charisma, seemingly, as the press love him, as do the people. He always seems to know the right things to say. However, the men in the field can barely contain their hatred of him. The SWAT commander wants to go in firing, and Obobo will have none of that, so he sends him off to write reports. The FBI man wants action, but Obobo will have none of it and sends him off for logistical support. Here's a passage from the book that describes Obobo's mindset at work:"Finally. He swaggered to the phone. This was his moment. His whole life he'd been able to synthesize arguments, turn them around instantly, and reiterate them in cajoling tones, until his opponent had agreed with him. It was his strength. He knew he could do it now, brilliant synopsizer, genius of empathy, purveyor of mega-earnestness. Colonel Obobo looked around, saw Renfro standing close by, giving him encouragement through sympathetic, even moist, eyes."That was when the terrorists were about to talk to him for the first time, but they wouldn't play ball and it left him completely unnerved. He's viewed as a dunderhead by his all knowing staff, and his decisions get others in trouble.Okay, enough! I realize not everyone out there likes Obama -- hell, I can barely tolerate him, even though I voted for him twice. I just think he's by far the lesser of two evils. But to rip the president like this under the guise of fiction, no of a thriller, is just too much to take and I gave up on page 178. I've read some Hunter before and enjoyed him in the past, so I *might* give him another chace, but if I see this crap again, he's gone, history, see ya. What an asshole. Not recommended, unless you're a right wing bigot.
    • 3/5
      A group of terrorists take over the Mall of America in Minnesota during the Christmas rush.Some see this as an opportunity to advance their careers but Marine sniper, Ray Cruz is one of the few who takes positive action.Well written and suspenseful.
    • 3/5
      Radical Islamic terrorists take over the largest shopping mall in America where Ray Cruz, a retired military sniper, and his fiancee are shopping. They violently hold more than a thousand hostages, and make demands. The leader is ruthlessly cold-blooded with no concern at all for human life, and so are his very young Somalian followers. Yet, not all of it is at it seems.Cruz is able to hide with a few others, having been separated from those held in hostage. Unbeknown to the terrorist group, he makes his plan to stalk and kill them one-by-one, stealthily, quietly. In the meantime, the police force is outside, unaware of Cruz and what he's up to inside, making attempts at delicate negotiations to peacefully end the standoff with no loss of hostages, and Cruz, unaware of the negotiations, just might ruin it all.This is a suspenseful, fast-paced read. The unique thing about this book is that the hero is not your ethnically ordinary American and he doesn't seem to be the only hero, although he is the main character hero but room is left for other characters.
    • 2/5
      I keep reading Stephen Hunter and the only justification I can give is I like his characters. The basis for his stories are good, too, but I think if THAT story had been given to another writer, I would have enjoyed it much more. I was going to say "everyone would have enjoyed it more" but I don't like to include other people's opinions in mine. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I keep trying to figure out what it is I don't like about his books and I think it's the dialogue. He seems to write like a 15 year old boy who's jacked up on bang, bang, shoot 'em up. Yes, I know Ray and Bob are heroes. Do we have to keep repeating it? I find myself skipping over multiple paragraphs to get back to the story. I know Bob is a backwoods southerner but geez - the dialogue. I think I have to let Stephen Hunter go. As much as I like his characters and his basic stories, for me - they're ruined by the dialogue the author writes.
    • 2/5
      Stephen Hunter's "Soft Target" is a major disappointment that reads like a novelization of a superficial action film that includes sideline commentary on the state of America's politicians and lawyers. These latter elements make the book more of a satire than the type of action thriller that we have come to expect from Hunter. Yes, I know that characters like Howard "Howdy Duty" Utey from the Swagger series were also meant to personify the bureaucratic mindset in opposition to action men such as Bob Lee Swagger and Nick Memphis, but Colonel Douglas Obobo is an embarrassing right wing-nut/Tea Party inspired projection of, you guessed it, Barack Obama, as self-seeking bureaucrat personified. The hero this time is Ray Cruz who first appeared in Hunter's last book "Dead Zero". Journalist Nikki Swagger makes a cameo appearance and the iconic Bob Lee Swagger only appears via a brief recorded phone message. The villains are a pretty lame cardboard bunch of Somali Islamists some of whom who were coerced into joining the fight and they are led by, get this, a first-person-shooter video game obsessed American turncoat looking to direct and immortalize his own apocalyptic shoot-out. It all goes down in a Mall of America inspired location. Either Hunter has lost interest in writing the sort of thriller fiction that made for a solid core of fans from 1993's "Point of Impact" onwards or, like Tom Clancy, he has stopped writing his own books. I can't imagine that any long-term fans will find much to enjoy in this latest outing.