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James Patterson's Bestselling Classics
LaBrava. By Elmore Leonard. 432 pages. Harper Paperbacks. $15.
LaBrava
by Elmore Leonard
“Leonard is just about everything I love about the crime fiction genre.”
Before there was Quentin Tarantino or Miami Vice, there was Elmore Leonard. Leonard is just about everything I love about the crime fiction genre. He’s fast, he’s dark, he’s got style, and he has cleverly employed (dare I say popularized) utilitarian economy of language—a man after my own heart (or pen?). He once said in an interview, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. If proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.” LaBrava was one of the first Leonard books I read. LaBrava and his femme fatale are as quirky as they come, and once I finished that book, I had to go back and start at the beginning of the Leonard collection.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
This is one of my favorite books. I am Colombian and have read it in both Spanish and English. I read it in English for school and in Spanish for leisure and both times I could not put it down. It definitely keeps you on your toes with all of the generations and name repetitions. It's a fantastic read!
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