A loser gets the idea of taking sketchy people with money hostage and making them essentially pay ransom on themselves to get free. For his first victim, he and his two compatriots selects a former mob bookie. Unfortunately for them, the former bookie is a friend of a friend of federal marshal Raylan Givens, so they're in trouble before they've hardly gotten started.
I don't think I've ever read an Elmore Leonard book, and I've never watched Justified, so I wasn't sure what Leonard's writing was like. I was expecting something to which you could apply the description "hard-boiled". Maybe not noir, but occupying a nearby neighborhood.
This feels more like Fargo, because these crooks are kind of a bunch of idiots. The mastermind, using the term so loosely it hangs off like a child wearing a hot air balloon for a shirt, is a pretend tough guy who alternates between smoking pot and trying to dose runaway girls on acid to extort ransom money from their parents. A scumbag, but a lazy, unimaginative scumbag.
Of the other two, one was supposed to bringing the mastermind to the bookie over unpaid debts, only to switch sides. He randomly decides to rob a grocery store and threaten to cut a woman's finger off with gardening shears for her wedding ring. Louis Lewis is the only halfway competent one, and he's figuring out ways to cut the other two out from the word "go." It's impressive these guys can zip up their flies without a step-by-step picture book.
The situation isn't written as a mystery so much as a puzzle for Raylan. He pretty quickly figures out where things are happening and who at least two of the people are. The real problem is, he needs a way to gain lawful entry to the house, when all he has are hunches and things a psychic that's mixed up in this is telling him. That's the puzzle, finding the right combination to be able to walk in, before it's too late.
Leonard adds a subplot where the friend that dragged Raylan into this is a woman he's sort of seeing, but they've hit a rocky patch over her inability to accept him killing a man. But Raylan seems unable to explain how he knew the man would be armed when he sat down at the table, and Leonard never writes where we see Joyce's inner thoughts. She's looking for a justification, and he can't provide one she accepts, so the thing just goes round and round until the characters spin off away from each other.
'Louis found Chip in the kitchen making himself a Bloody Mary and asked him, "Who's Ezra Pound?"
Chip said, "Ezra Pound," stirring his drink and then pausing. "He was a heavyweight. Beat Joe Louis for the crown and lost it to Marciano. Or was it Jersey Joe Walcott?"'
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