Nineteen-year-old Halvor Skramstad takes part in a dramatic lifeboat escape after M/S Tomar is torpedoed. In the autumn of 1940 he is offered a position as a sailor on one of the world’s biggest tank ships. Halvor knows that the ship is transporting aviation fuel, a load which is as dangerous as ammunition, and he knows that Great Britain is in desperate need of this fuel in order to keep the planes of the Royal Air Force aloft. He becomes one of the seamen who play a historical role in the battle against Nazi Germany in a critical phase of The Battle of Britain.
Powerful enemies await them at sea: The German submarine force, German bombers, heavy crossers and lethal mines. In Liverpool, the Irish girl Muriel Shannon is – perhaps – waiting for Halvor, who loves her.
The Shooter is the second volume of Jon Michelet’s sweeping novel A Hero of the Sea. It is an epic tale of the seas as well as a rendering of an aspect of World War Two not often touched upon in fiction: tanker traffic in the convoys in the Battle of the Atlantic.
