The story was good, the writing was good, but I listened to this one as an audiobook, and for some reason the volume on this one was way too low. I cranked my player up as loud as it could go, and still could only hear this one at night when the noise from traffic outside was gone. My player works fine for every other audiobook I've tried this month, so it was definitely a fault in the recording. ( )

“Sieg Heil, y’all. I’m Honey Deal”

I adore Honey Deal.

This is the way our Honey addresses the gathering of weird, wannabee WWII spies. I laugh out loud. Not one of my typical giggles when something amuses me in a book. Most times, I only smile, but when it’s Elmore Leonard’s dialogue, all bets are off. And this is a novel completely carried by dialogue. No one does it better.

“My husband was in the shipping business, coastal freighters that traded among ports on the Black Sea. Fadey got along with the Soviets, gritting his teeth, offering bribes when his bullshit wasn’t enough. He had only complimentary things to say about Josef Stalin, that pockmarked midget. Do you know how tall he is? The Russians say five foot six. Oh, really? He wears lifts in his shoes or he’d be no taller than a five-foot pile of horseshit. It’s the reason he’s killed ten million of his own people. His mother sent him to a seminary to become a priest, but God rejected him.”

“‘I love Virgil,’ the Tulsa lieutenant said. ‘The first thing he ever said to me--we’re in that bar in the basement of the Mayo. He says, ‘You ever been in a pissing contest?’ I said no, what do you go for, height or distance? He says, ‘No, we piss on the ice in urinals and bet on whose pile of cubes gets melted down the most.’ But the thing about your dad, he didn’t piss on any kind of regular basis. He could hold it.’
‘That’s why he’s still one of the great pissers,’ Carl said, ‘he can hold it as long as he wants , which you don’t find at all in men his age. I’ve been in that bar with my dad, but I can’t say I ever pissed next to him. Go in the woods with him hunting, I don’t think I ever saw him piss, not wanting to leave his sign.’
‘That’s your dad,’ the Tulsa lieutenant said.”

“Vera said, ‘Bo, I don’t want to be in this house anymore. Please get me out of here before I become an alcoholic.’
‘You already are.’
‘I count my drinks,’ Vera said. ‘I never have more than twenty-five in a day.’”
( )

Sequel to "The Hot Kid" and even better. Wish this was a movie, I could envision all the scenes as I read it. Elmore Leonard at the top of his game. ( )

An odd book. Kevin is one of the main characters for the first three chapters, than receives another assignment and basically disappears. Otto goes off and is not mentioned again until near the end. Nothing really happens until the very end. ( )

Good for a hot afternoon with your feet up. ( )