Viper Three

by Walte wager and Walter Wager

Book Overview

Vintage movie tie-in paperback This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0006CKGP6
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Macmillan
• Length: 257 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

If Quentin Tarantino made The A team it might look like this...

A rag-tag group of convicted killers, led by a fanatical US Airforce officer who had been on death row for killing his wife(and he really did it this time,there's no copping out by making him innocent), hi-jack a nuclear missile silo and demand an outrageous ransom. I first read this book in the early 80's after watching the 1977 film adaptation with Burt Lancaster, Twilight's Last Gleaming. The book is waaaaaaay better. For starters all of the characters who hi-jack the missile silo are like Quentin Tarantino types: the goombah hitman, the religious psycho, the twitchy sex offender, the capable black bad-ass--all under the command of the steely Military Man. The 1977 version blands things out considerably and , basically gets rid of everything from the novel except the premise of men holding a missile silo for ransom. The reasons in the film are murky and then pretentious,trying too hard to make some sort of anti-militarist point; in the book they just want money. VIPER THREE has a weird, cynical, absurdist edge to it that i found very entertaining. When the climax came (yikes!) I found myself grinning and thinking...this needs to be re-made! Stephen Hunter tackles almost the exact same story in a wholly more modern and slam-bang way in another fantastic book, THE DAY BEFORE MIDNIGHT.