Pagan Babies

Written by Elmore Leonard

Narrated by Ron McLarty

Pagan Babies is classic crime fiction from the master of suspense, New York Times bestselling author Elmore Leonard. 

Father Terry Dunn thought he'd seen everything on the mean streets of Detroit, but that was before he went on a little retreat to Rwanda to evade a tax-fraud indictment. Now the whiskey-drinking, Nine Inch Nails T-shirt-wearing padre is back trying to hustle up a score to help the little orphans of Rwanda.

But the fund-raising gets complicated when a former tattletale cohort pops up on Terry's tail. And then there's the lovely Debbie Dewey. A freshly sprung ex-con turned stand-up comic, Debbie needs some fast cash, too, to settle an old score. Now they're in together for a bigger payoff than either could finagle alone. After all, it makes sense...unless Father Terry is working a con of his own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Oct 12, 2010
• ISBN: 9780061993848

Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard wrote more than forty books during his long career, including the bestsellers Raylan, Tishomingo Blues, Be Cool, Get Shorty, and Rum Punch, as well as the acclaimed collection When the Women Come Out to Dance, which was a New York Times Notable Book. Many of his books have been made into movies, including Get Shorty and Out of Sight. The short story "Fire in the Hole," and three books, including Raylan, were the basis for the FX hit show Justified. Leonard received the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He died in 2013.

Reviews for Pagan Babies

[bjkelley · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Perfect Elmore Leonard book. Good coherent plot, great writing, interesting characters with authenic sounding dialogue. As usual, you can't go wrong with and Elmore Leonard book.

[zmagic69 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It’s Elmore Leonard what mate needs to be said. It starts with a scam, it morphs into a multilayered scam, which turns into the opportunity for multiple crosses and double crosses to take place all with great humor. Another fun book by this author.

[charon07 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

An entertaining potboiler about a con game, an ex-con, the Detroit mafia, and a man who may or may not be a priest.

[kerns222 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Your basic E.L.: Dialog. Crime. Hustle. Cool (or whatever that's called these days). DetroitCity. But with Tutsis and Hutus. Beware: includes slaughter and some redeeming human features.

[frankoneill-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I started reading Elmore Leonard in the late 80s, when he had just become well known for his crime novels. I’ve read most of the novels he’s written since then. His death last year ended a brilliant writing career, but his books still have traction. He writes about crime with the best of them, but if there was a book genre called ‘entertainment’, I’d put him there, right at the top. Leonard will sacrifice anything, especially proper writing, in his efforts to entertain. “I try to leave out the parts readers tend to skip,” he once said.Many critics cite Get Shorty and Rum Punch as his best, but you could pick almost any of them; he never wrote a bad one. Pagan Babies is right up there with the best. Leonard’s main characters are always rogues and con men, and Pagan Babies stars one of the great rogues of modern literature. Match him up with a young insurance investigator who wants to be a stand-up comedienne and you have the funniest pair of scoundrels walking the pages of any of Leonard’s books. Pagan Babies begins in post-genocide Rwanda and winds its way from Africa to Detroit, where Father Terry Dunn meets Debby, the insurance investigator, who spent three years in prison for deliberately running over her ex. Father Dunn and Debbie join forces in an effort to extort $250,000 from the ex, who now owns a restaurant frequented by most of Detroit’s top wise guys. When the head of the Detroit Mafia gets involved in their scheme, the book takes so many hilarious twists and turns you don’t know where it will end up.It might seem unfair to give a book like Pagan Babies the same rating as War and Peace, but given the limitations of the Goodreads star rating system, both get the same five star rating. Leonard is simply the best in his genre.

[samsattler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Elmore Leonard published novels for parts of seven decades (1953-2012) and more than twenty of his books were made into theatrical or television movies. Leonard began his career writing westerns but turned to crime fiction, the genre for which he is best known today, in the 1960s. By the time Pagan Babies was published in 2000, Leonard (who died in 2013 at age 87) had begun to slow his pace considerably but did later have great success with work that was turned into the television series Justified.Pagan Babies exhibits many of the traits that Elmore Leonard fans have come to love over the author’s long career. It is filled with long, quirky conversations that do as much to develop the novel’s characters – and even the plot – as anything else Leonard has to say about them. As is usually the case with Leonard, the plot moves along quickly but is subject to veering to the left or right at short notice because of the sheer ineptness of some of the novel’s characters. Elmore Leonard never seemed to have a very high opinion of the average intelligence of the criminal population, and it shows again in Pagan Babies.For reasons best kept to himself, Father Terry Dunn decides to leave his Rwanda church and return to his hometown of Detroit. That he witnessed the massacre by machete of forty-seven church members during his last Mass, and that the bodies are still inside the church weeks later, does have more than a little to do with his decision, but it does not tell the whole story. Now, despite having left Detroit five years earlier under a tax-fraud indictment, Father Dunn is willing to take his chances there. So armed with scores of pictures of Rwandan orphans and mutilated bodies, he comes home hoping to dodge the tax-fraud indictment and raise a little money for the orphans.But is Terry Dunn really a priest? He certainly doesn’t convince the two main women in his life at the moment, his sister-in-law and Debbie Dewey, a woman who sometimes works for his brother. In Terry Dunn, Debbie Dewey (who has just completed a three-year sentence for aggravated assault) sees a kindred spirit. And she may just be right because Terry seems to feel the same way about her. So when Debbie explains her plan to recover the $67,000 her ex-boyfriend stole from her, the pair joins forces in a complicated scheme they hope will net each of them considerably more than that amount. Remember, though, that this is an Elmore Leonard novel and soon enough a whole cast of dimwits is going to appear just in time to gum up the works, including Mutt, perhaps the dumbest hit-man in the history of crime fiction (and my favorite character in the book). Pagan Babies may not quite be Elmore Leonard in his prime, but it is still a damn fine crime novel. Take a look.

[adiasd_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A typical (and good) Elmore Leonard. Smart dialogues, cool characters and real fun reading.

[sturgispubliclibrary · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The time has come to elucidate some thoughts on one of the greatest and most diverse writers of American letters: Elmore Leonard. If you haven’t heard the name, I envy you for being able to read your first novel by this tremendous author. You may have seen, or heard, about his previous works, Get Shorty, Be Cool, The Big Bounce, but I highly recommend Pagan Babies. This novel has it all: a person imitating a priest; a hit man that doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing; a restaurateur trying to make an image of being a gangster; a standup comic who only wants a chance, but will settle for a free ride; and it all takes place in Detroit with an extra background of the Rwandan genocide. Trust me, this sounds a bit convoluted, but the end result is a great book that satisfies the thriller reader, the mystery reader, even the literary aficionado. For nothing else, pick this book up as a source to see how plain and beautiful language can be written, and kick back, relax, and enjoy the Elmore Leonard ride. This title is currently available in our library, so don’t miss out and read it today. Happy Reading!

[dutchfan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Everything that makes Elmore great is in this book: great dialogue, quirky characters, sense of place and strong point-of-view. The Rwanda setting is different for Elmore, but he pulls it off.

[name99_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Mildly amusing. Good for long-distance-driving.