Rating: 
Summary: The Masterful Leonard Comes Alive With 'Rum Punch'
Review: This is my second book by Mr. Leonard (the first being Get Shorty) and I am still very interested in his style of writing and plots. Sometimes confusing, sometimes obvious-- and always ready for a laugh. This guy cracks me up! His characters are wonderful, intriguing, and always entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and cannot wait to get my hands on another of his novels. Plot, characters, style, and dialogue are masterfully woven together to reveal a tapestry that exemplifies what novels and their movie counterparts should attempt to achieve-- keeping the reader hooked and guessing!
Rating: 
Summary: A 3 and a half star book rounded up to a 4 star rating
Review: This was my first Elmore Leonard book and I found it to be a pretty good, not great, effort. The story had enough twists and turns and different ways to turn out to keep things interesting. However, I did not find the character development or the scene descriptions to be as good as the story. Hence, a four star rating - I'd give it three and a half if that were an option.I may read another Leonard book, but probably not until I've read everything written by Pelecanos and Turow. All their crime mysterys that I've read are better, in my opinion, than this book.
Rating:
Summary: More like three and a half, I think...
Review: This was the second Leonard novel I read (after Touch), and I have to say that I found it a little confusing toward the end. I love intricate storylines; maybe I just should have paid attention more closely. Leonard's hard-to-put-down books always move at a good clip, and this was no exception. It did have great characters and dialogue, of course; I recommend it to everyone, especially Leonard fans.
Rating:
Summary: One hell of a good time
Review: to put this in simple terms, this book rocks! from start to end i was hooked on this book and couldn't put it down. elmore leonard makes these characters come to life and the story is so clever with a great ending. the story is about a black man, ordell "whitebread" robbie, who sells illegal weaponary to people. jackie burke, a flight attendant, transports ordell's profits from freeport to miami. but the feds are onto jackie, and she has to choose between helping the feds, or helping ordell.jackie also has another option with the help of max cherry, a bail bondsman looking to get out.
anybody that's looking for a good crime thriller to read, it's definitly this one.
Rating:
Summary: Better than most of his stuff.
Review: While this was most enjoyable of the nine or ten Leonard books I've read, I have to confess that I'm pretty sure that's because I was able to visualize the actors from the movie version (1997's Jackie Brown). While Leonard's characters always have great patter, I often have a hard time visualizing them as real people, so to have a mental picture going in helped a great deal. In this book, Leonard revives a trio (cons Ordell and Louie, and eye candy Melonie) from an earlier novel The Switch..., and picks them up 14 years and plenty of hard knocks down the road. The story is pretty basic super convoluted Leonard territory, ex-cons both crafty and stupid, a complicated money laundering operation, double-crosses, less than straight-laced cops, a wide range of women, a big score, and soforth. It has to be said that the way Leonard combines the elements is rather substantially more complicated than in others of his books-and indeed unnecessarily so, as the movie shows. I have to disagree with the majority viewpoint and declare the film superior to the book (a rarity). Tarantino clearly recognized and excised the burdensome subplots and unlikely coincidences, and the resulting script is smoother and more believable. For example, Max's disintegrating marriage and his sparring with her busboy lover/painter adds nothing and doesn't go anywhere. Similarly, Ordell and Louis's robbery and killing of some neo-Nazis is set up early on, disappears for a long time, then plays out rather foolishly, but never leads to anything. Most importantly, the notion of Louis working briefly with Max Cherry is dropped. In any event, in both book and film, the focus is on stewardess Jackie, and her playing both sides against each other in order to walk off with half a million. That's the fun stuff, and while the book has too many distractions from this, it's still more enjoyable than most of his work.
Rating:
Summary: Another fine big Leonard book
Review: You either love Leonard or you hate him. I love him but I have to admit his books resemble each other quite a lot. But that is part of genre writing. Leonard is admirable. He develops a strong female character beautifully in this one, and offsets her with several other female characters as foils.
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