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Sniper Elite
Spear of Destiny
One bullet can change history...
Berlin, 1945. Karl Fairburne is a member of an elite sniper corps, working for the American secret service deep behind enemy lines. Stalin's troops have overrun the city looking to revenge the battle of Stalingrad and seize control of the Nazi's nuclear secrets before their British and American allies.
SS General Helmstadt, head of the Nazi nuclear programme, is defecting to Russia, but first he plans the ultimate act of vengeance, to make the US pay for the defeat of the Third Reich. If he succeeds Russia will win the Cold War before it has even begun.
Karl has one chance to stop him. A single sniper's bullet will change the course of history.
Berlin, 1945. Karl Fairburne is a member of an elite sniper corps, working for the American secret service deep behind enemy lines. Stalin's troops have overrun the city looking to revenge the battle of Stalingrad and seize control of the Nazi's nuclear secrets before their British and American allies.
SS General Helmstadt, head of the Nazi nuclear programme, is defecting to Russia, but first he plans the ultimate act of vengeance, to make the US pay for the defeat of the Third Reich. If he succeeds Russia will win the Cold War before it has even begun.
Karl has one chance to stop him. A single sniper's bullet will change the course of history.
- GenresFiction
320 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published September 15, 2006
8 people are currently reading
44 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 14, 2018
Interesting read. I enjoy military style books in general. The way the author describes the skills and actions of a sniper in ww2 combat is good. I did notice that there were a few grammatical and spelling errors in the book that were easy to pick out.
February 16, 2014
Not a terrible book. Lots of action with very little down time. Terrible editing and the author made numerous mistakes with basic punctuation, grammar, and spelling. The ending was one of the worst I can remember reading. In a lot of ways, I'm surprised the book made it into print without a good edit.
November 12, 2022
Sniper Elite: Spear of Destiny is a book that I would have loved if I read it when I was in Middle School. But I'm not in Middle School anymore, and the typos, flat characters, and dull plot were enough to drag it down for me.
Spear of Destiny is a bit too pulpy for my taste -- it focuses on the minute details of the action, occasional titillation, and a garbage plot where it almost seems like the author thought he was being clever but he actually wasn't.
Like the Sniper Elite games, Spear of Destiny focuses on Karl Fairburne, an American sniper who goes around shooting people through World War II and occasionally pulling off impressive shots. The stories in the games aren't particularly good, and Spear of Destiny doesn't do much better. Karl is fleshed out some, but his personal drama feel manufactured and he comes off like a petulant, incompetent child most of the time rather than an elite sniper. He gets shot all the time, messes up constantly, and has all the emotion and growth of a brick wall -- until he doesn't, and decides to have a tantrum for some reason. In some ways, this captures my experience of the games perfectly (I'm not a particularly talented sniper or stealthy operator when I play), but that doesn't make it fun to read.
Unfortunately, the book also seems to have been published without an editor. Spear of Destiny might literally be the most typo-ridden professionally-published book I've ever read -- and even the lines without typos suffer from odd sentence structure or weirdly present (or absent) commas. You have to inject a lot of your own personality into the dialogue, because if you read it exactly as written it would be almost entirely in monotone.
If low-brow, pulpy action is your thing -- and you don't have standards for a lack of typos -- you could do worse than Sniper Elite: Spear of Destiny. You don't even need to have played the games to understand what's going on! But there is an absolute abundance of WWII literature out there, so I imagine you could do better.
Spear of Destiny is a bit too pulpy for my taste -- it focuses on the minute details of the action, occasional titillation, and a garbage plot where it almost seems like the author thought he was being clever but he actually wasn't.
Like the Sniper Elite games, Spear of Destiny focuses on Karl Fairburne, an American sniper who goes around shooting people through World War II and occasionally pulling off impressive shots. The stories in the games aren't particularly good, and Spear of Destiny doesn't do much better. Karl is fleshed out some, but his personal drama feel manufactured and he comes off like a petulant, incompetent child most of the time rather than an elite sniper. He gets shot all the time, messes up constantly, and has all the emotion and growth of a brick wall -- until he doesn't, and decides to have a tantrum for some reason. In some ways, this captures my experience of the games perfectly (I'm not a particularly talented sniper or stealthy operator when I play), but that doesn't make it fun to read.
Unfortunately, the book also seems to have been published without an editor. Spear of Destiny might literally be the most typo-ridden professionally-published book I've ever read -- and even the lines without typos suffer from odd sentence structure or weirdly present (or absent) commas. You have to inject a lot of your own personality into the dialogue, because if you read it exactly as written it would be almost entirely in monotone.
If low-brow, pulpy action is your thing -- and you don't have standards for a lack of typos -- you could do worse than Sniper Elite: Spear of Destiny. You don't even need to have played the games to understand what's going on! But there is an absolute abundance of WWII literature out there, so I imagine you could do better.
September 2, 2017
Good fiction about an OSS operative during World War II. Gives more background information on the first person shooter computer game series Sniper Elite.
November 18, 2020
EXCELLENT!!!!!
Lives up to the Sniper Elite Franchise.
Great read, action packed and suspenseful with lots of twists. I enjoyed it immensely.
Lives up to the Sniper Elite Franchise.
Great read, action packed and suspenseful with lots of twists. I enjoyed it immensely.
February 26, 2021
With the action, this book was absolutely awesome and I liked how skilled Karl Fairburne is
November 28, 2015
Certainly a page-turner, with intriguing political undertones and some surprising depth.
Unfortunately the descriptions of violence become gratuitous (though it doesn't shy away from expressing some horrors of warfare) and unnecessary to push the story along or even make a point. The ending of the story is also largely unrealistic and quite disappointing. Some of the characters also seemed rather one-dimensional.
Nevertheless, the historical backdrop and the general story makes for good reading and, though the story is fiction, provides an interesting insight into the final days of World War II in Europe.
Unfortunately the descriptions of violence become gratuitous (though it doesn't shy away from expressing some horrors of warfare) and unnecessary to push the story along or even make a point. The ending of the story is also largely unrealistic and quite disappointing. Some of the characters also seemed rather one-dimensional.
Nevertheless, the historical backdrop and the general story makes for good reading and, though the story is fiction, provides an interesting insight into the final days of World War II in Europe.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews