Uncle Ben's Book Blog: Killshot

I listen to books in the car. When I go out of town on the weekend for a preaching assignment, I usually get a whole book done. Otherwise, it takes a couple of weeks to get through a book; depending, of course, on how long the book is. Usually, this means fiction, because I get the books from the library, and they don't seem to have a good selection of non-fiction available. It would be nice to get some good theology in audio book form. If anyone knows of such, let me know.

I just finished listening to Elmore Leonard's Killshot. It is actually an older book (1989) that I've read at least once before, but not for a long time. The movie version is out on DVD now (never made it to the theaters, even though it stars Mickey Rourke and Diane lane) and is on our Netflix playlist. So I thought I'd listen to it in preparation for the movie. If you don't know anything about Elmore Leonard, he is an older writer (born in 1925) and got his start writing Westerns in the 1950's. He made the move to crime fiction in the late sixties and never looked back. He became a fixture on the New York Times Bestseller List in the late eighties, and several of his books have been made into movies (mostly not nearly as good as the book). Perhaps two of the best-known movies are Out of Sight, starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, and Get Shorty starring John Travolta. Leonard writes crime fiction, not murder mysteries. What that means is there is usually no mystery, though there may be murders, and usually other crimes involved. The characters mostly function either on the wrong side of the law, or around its fringes, but they are always interesting. Leonard also has a real knack for dialogue.

Killshot focuses on a hitman teamed with another criminal, up against an iron worker and his wife, due to circumstances that bring them all together. I won't tell you more about the plot, because that's part of the fun of reading an Elmore Leonard. It's definitely worth a read.