Oklahoma City. Hiroshima. Cambodia. Dachau. I seem to be fascinated by places of great horror. Places where the unspeakable have happened. I don’t have a ready reason to the why. Except that I want to understand how these things happen. And perhaps, to find a way to stop them.

I’ve never been to Rwanda where some 800,000 humans were slaughtered by their own people for no reason at all. Like the others, it is a place of unimaginable terror. It is also a strange setting for an Elmore Leonard book. A guy who usually sets his tales in Detroit. Yet Rwanda is exactly where he opens Pagan Babies, and that right in the aftermath of the genocide.

The story focuses on Terry a priest who lived in Rwanda during the time of the genocide who has become tired of seeing the perpetrators  of that atrocity  not see a trial, and not be punished in anyway. He sets a plan in motion which eventually takes him to more typical Leonard territory, Detroit.  There he meets a lady, mixes with the mob and works a con or two.

It is top-form Leonard. The dialogue sparkles, the action is fast, furious and fun. Beyond the fairly brief bits in Rwanda the rest of it is pretty much vintage Leonard too. The man might not change formulas very often, but he’s is so constantly solid in his abilities that it doesn’t matter. It certainly doesn’t here.

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