As regards casting, I always imagine a slightly older and beat-up Nathan Fillion (Firefly) as Earl, while I think Kevin Bacon or Chris Cooper could play Bob Lee.

I just wish there could be a ‘Frequency’ type ending, where Bob Lee is able to send a message back through time and save poor Earl’s life.

For a writer who’s not exactly a member of the socialist party, Hunter wrote about Castro and Batista reasonably fairly and didn’t try to pretend that pre-revolutionary Cuba was a nice place to be. This allowed some fairly nasty villains for Earl to come up against, especially Ojos Bellos, a particularly memorable torturer.

Recommended as always.

Generally when writers take a character outside their normal setting, it doesn’t work and taking the sniper Bob Lee into a Japanese setting, Hunter also fell into this trap. The idea that a 60-something Bob Lee could master samurai swordmanship in weeks, so as to defeat a young Japanese man who had studied it for years was a little patronising; we’ve already seen that sort of thing in The Last Samurai etc.

Still, plenty of action and character development and some precious scenes with Earl (which will presumably be sadly increasingly rare, as Hunter is almost out of ‘lost’ parts of Swagger senior’s life to work into the novels). A good read – but let’s keep Bob Lee with a gun in his hand please.