Oh Happy Day!!!!!

[Groo The Perverted]

I just found out that there was a new Elmore Leonard Book! Called "Road Dogs" and it's main character is Jack Foley (George Clooney played the character in "Out of Sight"), and it picks up immediately following Out of Sight. AWESOME!!!!

'Road Dogs' unites three familiar characters from Leonard's earlier novels - Jack Foley, Cuando Rey, wealthy conman and Cuban refugee ('LaBrava'), and Dawn Navarro, a beautiful psychic from 'Riding the Rap'. 'Road Dogs' is the story of gentleman/banker-robber Jack Foley, who got caught by a die-pack on one easy robbery. He's back in prison doing a thirty-year sentence after a week-long escape. Foley has been brought in by Karen Sisco, US marshall, who got her man after being abducted with the escapees. Jack and Karen have a thing for each other, and Karen arrests him after a meaningful 'time'out' together. Jack is resigning himself to doing time, lots of it, and he seems to have a friendly and easy control over the hardened criminals he is imprisoned with. This easiness is enhanced in the minds of others by his fame as a bank robber. It is this ease which impresses Cundo Rey, a Cuban refugee and criminal who is doing time for murder. Cundo arranges to have Foley's sentence hugely reduced, but has favours aplenty to ask when they're both released.Cundo's wife, Dawn, is pretending to be saintly all the while (whilst quite the opposite) under the negligent eye of The Monk, a gay accountant similarly in thrall to Cundo. Foley is freed, and, as he fears, Cundo wants to use him on a job, just as his every move is being scrutinised by FBI detective Lou Adams. In an instant, though, Dawn has seduced him, and she has an agenda all of her own.

I found out yesterday and ordered it, and it'll be here tomorrow! That and another newer book of his called "Swag".

Any Leonard fans in here?

[Groo The Perverted]

Actually got around to getting BACK to this the last few days and just finished it.

Really good.

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, May 2009: Be Cool. If Elmore Leonard hadn't already used it for the sequel to Get Shorty, it would have been a natural title for this deliciously breezy follow-up to another Leonard-to-Hollywood hit, Out of Sight. You may best recall Jack Foley, as played by George Clooney, bantering with Jennifer Lopez in the trunk of a jailbreak getaway car, but when Out of Sight ended, Foley was headed back to the clink to finish a 30-year bid. Road Dogs opens with Foley on the van to prison with Cundo Rey, a pint-size Cuban who soon engineers their early release--legally, this time. Jack's happy to be out and enjoying the California hospitality of Cundo and his wife Dawn (both Leonard veterans too, from LaBrava and Riding the Rap).

But Dawn is lovely and wily (and maybe a psychic), Cundo is a murderously jealous husband who may well think Jack owes him big-time, and Jack? Well, when you've robbed a hundred-twenty or so banks, is it that easy to go straight? As so often with Leonard, the real fun is less in the action than the talk, especially from Foley, the pleasure-minded, level-headed hood: an ex-con whose biggest con may be that he is exactly who he says he is. --Tom Nissley

Questions for Elmore Leonard

Q:Where did the inspiration for the title Road Dogs come from?

A: Road Dogs was on a list of prison expressions my researcher Gregg Sutter got for me: inmates who watch each other’s back. I liked the sound of the words together.

Q: What made you decide to bring back Jack Foley, Cundo Rey, and Dawn Navarro now? What is it about these three characters that stuck with you through the years?

A: Foley was played by George Clooney in Out of Sight. I imagined George in the scenes I wrote and it worked. Dawn Navarro was the psychic in Riding the Rap, a supporting character ready for a leading role. Cundo Rey from LaBrava, another favorite of mine, also deserved a bigger role, so I brought him back..

Q: Any chance Foley and the woman he loves, Federal Marshal Karen Sisco, will be back in the near future?

A: I’m not sure Foley is up to robbing another bank. But Karen Sisco, the federal marshal in Out of Sight, could show up again; maybe working for her dad, a private investigator.

Q: One of the hallmarks of your writing is your gift for the telling detail. When Foley is offering Cundo Rey’s money man, Jimmy, some advice about his skimming, he tells him that Cundo won’t kill him, but he might “break your legs with a José Canseco bat.” That’s one of those small yet wonderfully deft touches that adds color without slowing the pace. How do you do this so well?

A: Realism is the key to my style of writing and dialogue is what keeps it moving, always in live scenes. Rather than use my voice, my language, to describe what’s going on, I let the characters tell who they are and what they’re up to by the way they talk. Scenes are written from a character’s point of view, never mine.

Q: Many of your characters are working class stiffs and tough, intelligent broads. What draws you to these kind of characters? What do you think accounts for their popularity?

A: My women often upstage the guys; they’re natural, their own person, while my cops and criminals talk the way I’ve observed them through research and being on the scene.

Q: What’s next for Elmore Leonard?

A: Next comes Djibouti, with Dara Barr, a documentary filmmaker with the Somali pirates off the coast of East Africa.

From Publishers Weekly
Leonard launches three characters from previous novels on a collision course in this seemingly effortless performance. After prison buddy Cundo Rey (last seen in LaBrava) drops a bundle on a shark attorney, celebrity bank robber Jack Foley (from Out of Sight) gets his 30-year prison sentence reduced to 30 months. Jack's quickly back in the world, living large in one of Cundo's two multimillion-dollar houses in Venice, Calif., juggling a fast seduction with fortune-teller (from Riding the Rap) Dawn Navarro (who is now Cundo's lady) and the untoward attention of rogue FBI agent Lou Adams, who's waiting for Foley to rob another bank. While Dawn tries to enlist Foley in a scheme to steal Cundo's off-the-books fortune, Cundo surprises them with an early release. Betrayal simmers while Foley considers going semi-straight—with the help of a widowed starlet—Dawn hatches a plan that could get her rich and rid her of all her problems, and Cundo's associates and neighborhood toughs get sucked into the fray. The plot isn't as tight as it could be, but Leonard's singular way with words is reason enough to read it. (May)
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