I’d fallen behind in my Stephen Hunter reading the last year or so. I get most of my books from a used book store, and they never seem to have any Hunter in stock. But I recently got a chance to order his two most recent paperbacks, and Night of Thunder is the first in line.

Night of Thunder is about NASCAR, the races, the business, and the culture. It exhibits many of the qualities of NASCAR itself—lots of action, lots of color, plenty of thrills, and very little substance. In other words, Night of Thunder is an entertainment, the most purely cotton candy, Coors-in-a-cooler, hoo-rah spectacle of any of Hunter’s novels. That sounds like a put-down, but it all depends on what you’re looking for. Nobody delivers more entertainment per consumer dollar than Stephen Hunter, and you’ll have fun with this book. But I don’t think you’ll remember it long.

At the end of the last Bob Lee Swagger novel, the preposterous but marvelous The 47th Samurai, our Vietnam War Marine Sniper veteran hero came home from Japan with a badly wounded hip. Since then, we are told, he’s started walking with a limp, and his hair has gone gray (a shock to me, since I’ve always imagined him as Sam Elliot).

Still, his life is good. He lives on a beautiful ranch in Idaho. His new adopted daughter, Miko, is turning into an expert rider, and his oldest daughter, Nikki, is starting a career as a journalist, working at a newspaper in Bristol, Virginia.

Then the news comes. Nikki has been in a car accident. Some crazy, drunk kid (the police assume) started playing car tag with her on a winding mountain road, and things got out of hand. Fortunately she wasn’t killed, but she’s hospitalized, in a coma.

Bob Lee goes to check things out, and soon comes up with questions. The deeper he digs, the more convinced he becomes that this was no accident. Someone purposely forced Nikki off the road. She’d been investigating rural meth labs. Had she seen something or learned something that put her life in danger?

Well, yeah. You know she did. And you can more or less guess the general outline of the rest. People will try to kill Bob Lee. He will beat them. There will be a major confrontation, and Bob Lee will get at least one chance to use his world class sniper skills.

The Big Reveal at the end took me completely by surprise, though. Of course, I’m pretty easy to fool.

I can quibble about a couple things. At one point Hunter recaps the climax of The 47th Samurai in detail—a spoiler which will cheat anyone who happens to read this volume before the one that precedes it. I find it hard to comprehend why an author of Hunter’s skill would do such a thing. He also slips into some stereotypes that you’d expect from Hollywood, but might hope for better from a writer of Hunter’s sensibilities. You’ve got your hypocritical, sexually omnivorous “Baptist” preacher (though Hunter makes an effort to clarify that this preacher is not typical), and he brings in the old trope of the inbred southern clan. It should be noted that this is an outlaw clan, not presented as the norm, but isn’t it time to put that old joke to bed? This is one reason why I have to regard Night of Thunder as part farce. There are too many cartoonish characters in it.

Which does not mean I didn’t enjoy the book a lot. Hunter always gives value for money.

Cautions for language and adult situations. Not Hunter’s best, but enjoyable.