With Elmore Leonard, you usually know what you are going to get. Leonard's trademark is crisp and witty dialogue, unusual characters, and a plot that reveals itself in surprising ways. This book is no exception. It is not one of his most intriguing works - I found the storyline a little more predictable than normal for Leonard - but it is still a very worthwhile read.

If you are an Elmore Leonard fan, you will enjoy this book. If you have never read Leonard's work, I would recommend starting with Get Shorty, Rum Punch, or Pagan Babies first and come back to this one.

With Elmore Leonard, you know you are going to get 3 things: 1) lots of dialogue (often funny), 2) an unusual assortment of characters, and 3) stories that interwine in clever and unique ways. You still get that here, but the story and the characters just don't feel that fresh.

The story centers on an old lawyer (worth millions) who gets killed. After his death, his former associates attempt to figure out ways to get some of his left-behind wealth while a few police detectives try to unravel the case.

I think the problem with the novel is that Leonard shows you all the cards very early on (who is guilty, who knows who, who will do what); therefore, there is very little suspense and surprise in the story.

The dialogue is still funny, but there isn't anything original about the story or the characterizations.

In terms of an audiobook, Mr. Paradise is quite difficult to listen to. Robert Forster speaks in a dry monotone that puts you into auto-drive and you may daydream through parts. Another problem is that there is so much dialogue in the book (and Forster does little to differentiate characters), that it becomes difficult to follow who's talking.

If you are interested in reading Leonard, I would recommend starting with Get Shorty.

Leonard is as light on his feet as ever, as he breezes through dangerous capers back in a city that deserves a chronicler who knows how to put on the funk.

At the swank Detroit estate of Mr. Paradise, hellzapoppin. He's an unsavory, autocratic old crab, likely to live next to forever just to spite the family and retainers who stand about with their tongues extended, hoping to catch big drops of inheritance. He also has innocently kinky sexual tastes, involving young ladies in half a cheerleader costume, and a vast library of U Michigan football tapes.

And when some impatient souls take it upon themselves to hasten the onset of probate, Kelly Barr finds herself inheriting a windfall - provide she can convince the world, and the cops, and the cop she starts to fall for, that she is the other, colder, stiffer cheerleader.

The heroine is unsentimantally disarming, the baddies bear us armloads of unwitting entertainment, the plot is tight and the dialogue tighter. In short, it's Elmore Leonard doing what he does best. Enjoy.

I won't summarize the plot because it's explained elsewhere, but the book seems to lack a lot of the snap and skill of his earlier works.

There are a lot more characters running around than are useful in a tight crime novel, too much exposition and too little action, lots of flashbacks slowing down the pace, and style of the writing is consistently arch and "hip"- it all sounds like someone imitating Leonard rather than the great one himself. The nature and quality of his work has been extremely consistent, but this book just doesn't fit in with his other stuff.

I've gotten pretty cynical about the publishing industry, so it wouldn't surprise me if they contracted the intial draft out to a ghostwriter with Leonard doing a quick touch up here and there to make it an Elmore Leonard novel. Not bad by the standards of most crime novels, but not good, either.

If you've heard great things about Leonard, start with one of the books from the 1980s or 1990s instead of this dog.

I'll leave it to others to summarize the plot of this book. (For an Elmore Leonard novel, summarizing the plot is somewhat like concentrating on the china pattern at a gourmet meal anyway). If you like Elmore Leonard, you'll like this novel.
I wanted to add two comments, though. One is that he seems to have reached a new level of terseness and expressiveness in his use of dialog and slang that makes each paragraph a delight. (A special pleasure of Elmore Leonard's novels is that, even as far back as the Westerns like "Valdez is Coming", a lot of the non-spoken narration was the train of thought of one of the characters. So the narration does double duty - it pushes the plot along but also lets you hear the thoughts of a lot of the characters.)
The other, related, comment is that Robert Forster (who starred in Quentin Tarantino's adaptation of another Leonard novel, Jackie Brown) narrates the audio version with terrific style and expression. If you like listening to audio versions of novels, this is a great "listen" as well as a great read - I frequently laughed out loud at the wisecracks, but also the ironic deadpan comments that Leonard intersperses in.