Gold Coast by Elmore Leonard

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is part of my Swampy’s Florida book collection.

Not sure why I had trouble connecting with this book. It does occur to me that I’ve had trouble connecting with characters in past Elmore Leonard books in the past. It was particularly difficult with this book. It could be that I’ve recently been reading books with very well drawn characters. These are well defined, but in the typical Leonard caricature that I struggled with. I should add there is one character that has a few levels that appear along the way.

This is a 1980 book that set a tenor that got expanded further by Carl Hiassen and Tim Dorsey, amongst others. The wacky Florida mystery stories really began with Leonard and this is one of the first. The story sops up the south Florida lifestyle of the rich and famous and adds the contemporary dark characters with gusto. The story is good and this book is well written. Many today are likely to be dissatisfied with the ending but, as occurs in Leonard novels past the characters, the story has a unique ending.

I’m chalking up my dissatisfaction with the characters with reading recent strong character driven novels and so the bottom line is: I recommend it.

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