“The book was better” is the laziest line in criticism. Nine times out of ten it means the reader got there first and resents the recasting. The face in your head was wrong, so the film is wrong. Fine. But there’s a harder version of the claim, and it’s the interesting one. Not the case where a bad film ruins a good book. The case where the film is genuinely good, respected, still watched, and the book still wins by a distance.

To understand what Stephen Hunter has built across four decades of fiction, you have to first understand what he is outside of it. Hunter spent nearly forty years as a newspaper journalist and film critic — first at the Baltimore Sun, where he joined in 1971 and became its film critic in 1982, then at the Washington Post, where he served as chief film critic from 1997 until accepting a buyout in 2008.

“Point of Impact” by Stephen Hunter is a gripping novel that immerses readers into the high-stakes world of a lone sniper caught in a deadly conspiracy. The cover of the book immediately sets the tone, with its bold, red and black design and the image of a sniper peering through the crosshairs of a rifle. The quote at the top promises “suspense that will wire you to your chair,” a claim that the narrative more than lives up to.