ROAD DOGS
Elmore Leonard
William Morrow
Thriller
ISBN: 9780061733147
Where would we be without Elmore Leonard? He’s done it all in genre fiction: caper novels, westerns, easterns, historicals, private eye. Read one and you will want to read them all. His work even spawned an entire sub-genre of films that tried (for the most part well but ultimately unsuccessfully) to capture what he has been able to do consistently on the printed page. ROAD DOGS, Leonard’s latest novel, meets the definition of “cool,” bringing together three disparate characters from three of his previous books in an amusing though uneasy set of shifting alliances that keep the reader guessing from beginning to end.
Anointed by the media as America’s foremost bank robber, Jack Foley, following the events in OUT OF SIGHT, is doing a 30-year stretch in Florida with no hope of parole. He is on the pen bus when he meets Cundo Rey, last seen bleeding out in LaBRAVA. Rey has had a number of adventures since then, not the least of which have involved acquiring real estate and a lot of money in Venice Beach, California. He has also obtained a de facto wife, Dawn Navarro, a professional psychic who the stalwart fan will remember from RIDING THE RAP. Rey ends up providing Foley with an attorney who gets his sentence reduced to three months, and Foley is released just two weeks ahead of Rey.
This doesn’t sit well with Lou Adams, an FBI special agent who has an unhealthy obsession with, and jealousy of, Foley. Adams dogs Foley’s path from his first steps out of prison all the way out to his new digs in Venice Beach, betting that Foley can’t go 30 days without robbing a bank. Foley is waiting for Rey to get released and join up with him in Venice for at least one caper, and has little to do but make the acquaintance of Navarro under the watchful radar of Little Jimmy, who (depending on who you ask) is either Rey’s money man or his boss. The weather is hot and steamy, the liquor never stops flowing, and the scheming is going every which way but loose. Adams recruits, by threat of deportment, a local gangbanger named Tico to keep an eye on Foley. But barely 24 hours pass before they are drinking Jack Daniels neat and smoking cigarettes while checking each other out and determining how they’re going to lay some blowback and payback on Adams.
Of course, everyone is scheming on everyone else, and, as Foley so wisely notes to himself in ROAD DOGS, what you see isn’t what you think it is. Words to live by. And it gets even better --- or worse, depending on your point of view --- once Rey gets to town. Rey has more loose screws than a hardware store, and Navarro, who has been waiting for him during his eight-year stint as a guest of the state of Florida, has her own ideas about a reward. Foley is caught in the middle of all of this, which he does not endure with good grace. As with all of Leonard’s works, there are plenty of memorable moments, not the least of which are a pickup basketball game, a dinner party where the main course is just a warm-up for dessert, and a game called roofball that you don’t want to play. The question for the book’s conclusion is not so much who will be left standing when the dust settles and the smoke clears, but if anyone will be left at all.
Whether you have read all of Leonard’s previous titles, are totally new to his canon, or cherry-picked his work here and there through the kindness of strangers and friends, you will love ROAD DOGS. File this one under “how the job is done.”
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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