In The 47th Samurai, Bob Lee Swagger, the gritty hero of
Stephen Hunter's bestselling novels Point of Impact and
Time to Hunt, returns in Hunter's most intense and exotic
thriller to date.
Bob Lee Swagger and Philip Yano are bound together by a
single moment at Iwo Jima, 1945, when their fathers, two
brave fighters on opposite sides, met in the bloody and
chaotic battle for the island. Only Earl Swagger survived.
More than sixty years later, Yano comes to America to
honor the legacy of his heroic father by recovering the
sword he used in the battle. His search has led him to
Crazy Horse, Idaho, where Bob Lee, ex-marine and Vietnam
veteran, has settled into a restless retirement and
immediately pledges himself to Yano's quest.
Bob Lee finds the sword and delivers it to Yano in Tokyo.
On inspection, they discover that it is not a standard
WWII blade, but a legendary shin-shinto katana, an
artifact of the nation. It is priceless but worth killing
for. Suddenly Bob is at the center of a series of terrible
crimes he barely understands but vows to avenge. And to do
so, he throws himself into the world of the samurai,
Tokyo's dark, criminal yakuza underworld, and the
unwritten rules of Japanese culture.
Swagger's allies, hard-as-nails, American-born Susan Okada
and the brave, cocaine-dealing tabloid journalist Nick
Yamamoto, help him move through this strange, glittering,
and ominous world from the shady bosses of the seamy
Kabukicho district to officials in the highest echelons of
the Japanese government, but in the end, he is on his own
and will succeed only if he can learn that to survive
samurai, you must become samurai.
As the plot races and the violence escalates, it becomes
clear that a ruthless conspiracy is in place, and the only
thing that can be taken for granted is that money, power,
and sex can drive men of all nationalities to gruesome
extremes. If Swagger hopes to stop them, he must be
willing not only to die but also to kill.