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Book Review of Pagan Babies

Pagan Babies
Pagan Babies
Author: Elmore Leonard
Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
Pattakins avatar reviewed on + 365 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1


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.