Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Gunsights

GunsightsGunsights by Elmore Leonard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When two friends (and Arizona legends) Bren Early and Dana Moon find them on opposite sides of a land dispute, will them come to bloodshed over mining rights? And what of Sundeen, the bounty hunter that they should have killed years before...

Elmore Leonard passed away this week so I dropped what I was reading and gave this a read. While it's an early Leonard and not up to the standards of his later crime novels, all the Leonard hallmarks are still there: smooth dialogue, likeable characters, and lots of twists.

Dana Moon and Brendan Early are the ancestors of a lot of Leonard's later crime leads. They're capable, sharp-witted men, and know their way around a gunfight. When Moon finds himself on the wrong side of a mining company that Early has a stake in, things heat up.

As usual, some of the bad guys aren't all that bad and could easily be good guys under other circumstances, specifically Ruben Vega. Actually, Sundeen isn't a bad guy for a son of a bitch. If I had a hole in my cheek from a gunshot wound, I'd probably be tracking down Early and Moon myself.

Par for the course, there are lots of twists and turns. I liked that the newspaper men were fanning the flames a lot of the time. No one in the media every does that now...

The structure wasn't quite what I'm used to from Elmore Leonard but it worked well, incorporating a lot of flashbacks to establish how Early and Moon got to where they were.

To sum up, it wasn't my favorite Leonard but as with all of his books, it was still an entertaining read. If penis size was proportional to the ability to write entertaining dialogue and cool characters, Elmore Leonard could have whipped his member out and clubbed narwhals to death with it. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

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