[.ca] Bandits (ISBN 0060512202)

plan B:
Someone, was it you Amazon, single breasted woman with your bow shooting arrows everywhere, recommended after george V higgins died, and I had read everything he wrote and begun collecting his signed firsts, that I try Leonard. This was my first, and while I think not in higgins' league, the king is dead, long live the king, I give it 4 stars and will try a couple more of his titles.

Sister of the Lepers:
Elmore Leonard gives his readers yet another interesting crime fiction. Jack Delaney is an ex-criminal trying to go straight but the pleasures of a plain lifetsyle don't seem to suit him one bit. He meets Lucy Nichols, an ex-nun and daughter of a rich businessman, who seems to be more lethal than your average woman. Soon, an alliance is formed with an ex-cop as the trio plan out a heist - millions to be stolen from a South American General. Expect plenty of twists and turns and some unpredictable elements throughout the story line. Of course, some of the happenings seem sort of stretchy, but it's Elmore Leonard and you can expect anything I guess. A good read, not great, worth checking out.

Nice try but not good enough:
This book was a good read, but nothing special. Once done I did not feel satisfied. While reading it I was waiting for the ending that would just blow me away but the conclusion was not satisfying at all. The nun ( only by name ) never realy acted as a nun. She did not indulge us in her religious ways that would have created a better compliment to the theives. She was just as devious as the criminals themselves which did not make her nun character anything relevent. I will continue to read Leanord's books, hopefully they will end with more of a bang than this one

If you've never read Leonard, don't start with this one:
I had read maybe eight or ten Elmore Leonard novels before I bought this one, and each had been a real page-turner. This one, though, tends to drag well before we're half-way through the book and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's some of the superfluous minor characters, maybe it's that the theme of moral ambiguity gets a little heavy-handed (we already know the Contras are no angels and neither are the Sandinistas), maybe it's the kind of blah ending, I don't know. But something's just a little off here. The dialogue shines through as always, though a little less brilliantly than in, say, "Pagan Babies" or "Swag." The locale just isn't as colorfully drawn as in "Maximum Bob." The bad guys are nowhere near as scary as the pair in "Killshot" (one of my favorites). The plot's thinner than "The Switch" or "Get Shorty." And Leonard handles the religion/morality/what-are-we-here-for thing far better, to my mind, in "Touch." I'd have to rank this one somewhere around the level of "Be Cool," another one that kind of left me a little indifferent. Put it this way -- it took me the better part of 10 days to get through this one. Leonard's best can be read in just a couple of evenings. Still, Elmore Leonard on his average days is still better than most people writing today on their very best ones.

Crime Fiction With A Twist:
Let's not beat around the bush: Bandits is flawed. But flawed in the same way that the Mona Lisa's smile is somehow not quite right, not quite natural. OK, let me back off a little. I'm not going to tell you that Bandits is high art, but it's quirky. In a good way. It's quirky because Elmore Leonard is stretching the boundaries of crime fiction here. All the Elmore Leonard basics are there - the girl, the ex-con, the heist, and that absolutely authentic dialog that perhaps more than anything else is Leonard's trademark. But underneath the skin Bandits is a psychological novel masquerading as a political statement masquerading as plot driven crime fiction. Or maybe more the mixed race love child of the three. Whatever it is, it's vintage Elmore Leonard, with a twist. The ex-con is Jack Delaney, former jewel thief, currently embarked on a new career as a funeral home assistant with his brother in law, at the persuasion of the parole system of the state of Louisiana. After three years Delaney's just not finding a whole lot of fulfillment in his new profession, and when he crosses paths with hot babe and former Sister of the order of Saint Francis of the Stigmata Lucy Nichols on a trip to pick up a body from the nearby church hospital, he starts getting antsy. The novel is set in the late 80's, during the period of the conflict between the Sandinista government and the contras, and Lucy's just back from a ten year stint ministering to the needs of lepers in a Nicaraguan hospital. She's not a nun anymore, but she doesn't know what she is instead yet. Part of her identity crisis evolves out of a little reality therapy administered to her while she was in country by contra Colonel Dagoberto Godovy, or Bertie as he likes to be called, who's in the US raising money from wealthy Republicans to fund the contras. It turns out that besides being an stereotypical short guy with a temper and an attitude problem, Bertie has a few other unreedeming social qualities, like a tendency to act out by chopping up lepers and pregnant women with a machete. The action revolves around Lucy and Jack's efforts to relieve the colonel of the warchest he's collected, and put it to better use than killing, maiming, and torturing innocent civilians so that they can be free of the scourge of communism. In the process they lead each other to unexpected discoveries about who and what they really are. There are a few weaknesses. The plot jerks around sometimes like a squirrel trying to get across the road, but it's always engaging. Leonard is also a little fanatical about dialog, so much so that he sometimes transitions between chapters with it in what stands out as being unwieldy amidst otherwise fairly seamless prose. And finally there's the ending. I won't go into details except to say that resolving one character's crisis at the end to my mind violated an honor that should have bound thieves. But as always Leonard delivers on solid entertainment, and the novel's other elements integrate it and give it a deeper authenticity.