Pagan Babies by Elmore Leonard (2002, Paperback)

If you've never read an Elmore Leonard novel in your life, don't start with Pagan Babies. If you're a fan of Elmore Leonard, this book will give you a fix, but it's not as satisfying as most of his other works.

WARNING: MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS, but I'll try to keep them to a minimum.

The book starts out with a stark, chilling account of genocide in Rwanda. After that, the plot moves to Detroit and we get the usual assortment of quirky characters, snappy dialog and plot twists. Someone's going to get conned out of a lot of money. But who's the con and who's getting conned? And how is the money going to be split afterwards?

That's standard operating procedure in an Elmore Leonard novel - a lot of money is up for grabs and you don't know who's going to get it until the final page.

Unfortunately, in this case, the con makes absolutely no sense. There's no adequate reason given why a certain character might hand over a large pile of money to a certain other character, rather than, say, shooting that person in the face and dumping their body in the Detroit River.

Most of the time, in an Elmore Leonard novel, several completely different plots all come together and the reader is amazed at how all the different plot elements fit together. In Pagan Babies, the plot seems forced and the ending is unsatisfactory.