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LeoMadigow

LeoMadigow

  • member since Friday, July 27 2007

Profile: Reviews

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  • Up in Honey's Room: A Novel
    • Rated 2 stars

    “I've read 31 books by Elmore Leonard so far, but I'm beginning to ask myself why. Late Leonard seems to be the same book with the same over-cool heroes and villains, the same heartless bastards contrasted against the same semi-bastards, with everyone talking in the same unrealistically flip way whether the book is set in the 80's, 90's, the present day, the 30's or the 40's. I know he has a team of researchers working for him, so why are there so many speech anachronisms in this preposterously plotted book? The Hot Kid was better than this, and Mr Paradise was better than The Hot Kid. Like all of his books, it's an easy read, but this one's a bit on the dull side, and the characters have to go over old conversations for no apparent reason. ”

    LeoMadigow wrote this review Sunday, October 28 2007. ( reply | permalink )
  • 361 (Hard Case Crime)
    • Rated 2 stars

    “I like Westlake best when he's writing as Richard Stark (the Parker novels) or in comic mode for the Dortmunder books. This is early Westlake. The narrator, just out of the air-force, is a bit of a blank slate. After his father is killed, and he loses an eye, he goes on a revenge kick. We get a potted history of how the mafia families were formed from the 30s to the 60s (when the novel is set) for no good reason. There seem to be two books here, as if the research for one was left over from an unwritten book , so the author threw it in anyway. There's very little momentum, and it's hard to care for the hero. Just before this I'd read Butcher's Moon, a double-sized Parker/Grofeld novel that shows what Westlake can do when he's firing on all guns. Still, even average Westlake is better than most. ”

    LeoMadigow wrote this review Saturday, October 27 2007. ( reply | permalink )
  • Legend of the Holy DrinkerLegend of the Holy Drinker
    • Rated 5 stars

    “Joseph Roth's last work is a faultless 49-page novella describing the last days of a 'clochard', or tramp. Even in translation, the dying writer, who had had a stroke and could only move a few feet, never puts a foot wrong, so to speak. A moving piece of life that demands to be read in one sitting.”

    LeoMadigow wrote this review Friday, October 5 2007. ( reply | permalink )
  • Jimmy the KidJimmy the KidDonald E. Westlake
    • Rated 4 stars

    “This is a double delight for fans of Donald E. Westlake/Richard Stark: a Dortmunder story in which one of the characters, Kelp, is reading a Parker book , chapters of which are interspersed in the text: 'Child Heist' by 'Richard Smart or whatever his name is'. Kelp decides to use the book as a blueprint for their next caper. He can't believe there are crime books in which the criminals succeed. The reader gets the best of both worlds: tough, no-nonsense Parker, and the bungling Dortmunder. ”

    LeoMadigow wrote this review Monday, September 24 2007. ( reply | permalink )


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