La Brava (1983) (37 page)

ELMORE LEONARD

WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL

"Have I got a book for you. LaBrava is a mean-streets romance, laconic and bittersweet, so thoroughly a film noir in novel form that a twenty-five-year-old Hollywood film noir is itself at the center of the plot... Check it out."

Washington Post Book World

"Elmore 'Dutch' Leonard is more than just one of the all-time greats of crime fiction. He's fast becoming an authentic American icon."

Seattle Times

"Nobody but nobody on the current scene can match his ability to serve up violence so light-handedly, with so supremely deadpan a flourish."

Detroit News

"Terrific... Leonard's best book so far."

Philadelphia Inquirer

"The debate over who's the all-time king of the whack job crime novelists just ended. Living or dead, Elmore Leonard tops 'em all."

Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

"Many surprises... The tone is dry and mordant, the action well-paced, and the voices of the riffraff convincing... LaBrava may be the best of Mr. Leonard's books; it is about as good as the form allows... a thriller whose conclusion is even more satisfying than the crackling exposition, whose denouement plausibly resolves an ironic plot that was fully thought through."

New York Times Book Review

"A giant among writers of crime fiction."

Columbus Dispatch

"A master of narrative... A poet of the vernacular... Leonard paints an intimate, precise, funny, frightening, and irresistible mural of the American underworld."

The New Yorker

"A major literary star... He defies categorization, and when you do try to categorize him, you are invariably wrong."

Chicago Tribune

"Very fine... Elmore Leonard is truly a great writer."

Washington Times

"Luridly entertaining... the elements congeal into a taut climax... Leonard has become a phenomenon... His crime novels [are] grippingly true-to-life tales of double-cross and redemption, with a murky morality that seems to suit the times... Leonard truly shines. He has created a gallery of compelling, off-the-wall villains unequaled in American crime fiction."

New York Times Magazine

"Leonard is incredible... I am in awe of this guy. His books are sheer entertainment, while at the same time maintaining total respect for the reader. There are days when I know I should be doing something else, but I can't make myself put down the Leonard book I am reading at the time."

Bob Greene, author of Duty

"Elmore Leonard is arguably the best living writer of crime fiction."

Roanoke Times & World News

"The man knows how to grab you."

Entertainment Weekly

"Tough and smart... His dialogue is so authentic that it dances off the page... The characters flash on and off in multicolored neon... And the scam that forms the backbone of the novel's plot is intriguingly mystifying."

New York Times

"The Dickens of Detroit... He creates colorful characters from the seamier side of life... His style is as strong and personal as Van Gogh's brush strokes. He has perfect pitch for the street talk you might hear from armed robbers who are not very good at armed robbery."

George F. Will

"Elmore Leonard has few peers... His work [is] marked by razor-sharp characterizations, wonderful dialogue, quirky humor, and the sort of seductive plots and movie-style editing that allows little time for questions."

Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Leonard's cinematic grasp of scene and setting, his ability to arouse within us a helpless sympathy for even the lowest of his characters, his quirky pacing and plot twists, and his sly humor and artfully oddball prose sear our eyeballs and keep the pages turning."

Miami Herald

"The best writer of crime fiction alive."

Newsweek

"Leonard is the best in the business: His dialogue snaps, his characters are more alive than most of the people you meet on the street, and his twisting plots always resolve themselves with a no-nonsense plausibility."

Newsday

"Nobody brings the illogic of crime and criminals to life better... Elmore Leonard likes his characters. He knows where they live, how they live, what they will and won't do, and, especially, how they talk and what they talk about... What makes his work memorable is his uncompromisingly direct prose, his affectionately crafted yet very real characters, and, of course, the fact that Leonard knows that providing entertainment is the novelist's first commandment... In LaBrava... the pace Leonard sets is fast... At the end is a double-cross, and a lovely ironic twist."

Christian Science Monitor

"Elmore Leonard is the Alexander the Great of crime fiction."

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"He turns out first-rate thrillers... crime books that sketch the dark side of the dollar, a world where street-crazies plot, scams rise and fall... Leonard has simply set loose the most frightening psychopaths in the pages of literature... By any standard, 'Dutch' Leonard is a rare find."

Bergen Record

Books by Elmore Leonard

The Bounty Hunters The Law at Randado Escape from Five Shadows Last Stand at Saber River Hombre The Big Bounce The Moonshine War Valdez Is Coming Forty Lashes Less One Mr. Majestyk 52 Pickup Swag Unknown Man #89 The Hunted The Switch Gunsights Gold Coast City Primeval Split Images Cat Chaster Stick LaBrava Glitz Bandits Touch Freaky Deaky Killshot Get Shorty Maximum Bob Rum Punch Pronto Riding the Rap Out of Sight Cuba Libre The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories Be Cool Pagan Babies Tishomingo Blues

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

LABRAVA. Copyright (c) 1983 by Elmore Leonard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound.

PerfectBound and the PerfectBound logo are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

MS Reader edition v 1. January 2003 ISBN 0-06-054709-X

First HarperTorch paperback printing: February 2003 First William Morrow trade paperback printing: May 1998 First William Morrow hardcover printing: October 1983

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