Search - Pagan Babies

In 'Pagan Babies' Elmore Leonard takes the reader from post-genocide Rwanda to mobbed up Detroit and back again. Leonard's writing here meets or exceeds his usual high standards for gritty and sardonic wit and intricate plot and then there are the characters who people his plot. Almost without exception, every character in the book is playing an angle of one kind or another - if not several angles.

Rich characters - there's 'Father' Terry Dunn returned from Africa to 'raise money for orphans' (the pagan babies), and ex-con with a schtick and a scam named Debbie Dewey, plus several Detroit Italian mobsters, a Hoosier hick hitman, not to mention several very bad banana-beer swilling men in Rwanda and 47 unburied bodies in Father Terry's Rwaandan church.

Good solid Elmore Leonard, though probably not among his best.

Father Terry Dunn thought he'd seen everything on the mean streets of Detroit, but that was before he went on a little retreat to Rwanda to evade a tax-fraud indictment. Now the whiskey-drinking, Nine Inch Nails T-shirt-wearing padre is back trying to hustle up a score to help the little orphans of Rwanda. But the fund-raising gets complicated when a former tattletale cohort pops up on Terry's tail. And then there's the lovely Debbie Dewey. A freshly sprung ex-con turned stand-up comic, Debbie needs some fast cash, too, to settle an old score. Now they're in together for a bigger payoff than either could finagle alone. After all, it makes sense . . . unless Father Terry is working a con of his own. Good Elmore Leonard read.

I confess I didn't finish it (yet, at least). That speaks for itself.