9780061993848
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Pagan Babies audiobook

  • By: Elmore Leonard
  • Narrator: Ron McLarty
  • Category: Crime, Fiction
  • Length: 7 hours 30 minutes
  • Publisher: HarperAudio
  • Publish date: October 12, 2010
  • Language: English
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Pagan Babies Audiobook Summary

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.

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Pagan Babies Audiobook Narrator

Ron McLarty is the narrator of Pagan Babies audiobook that was written by Elmore Leonard

 

About the Author(s) of Pagan Babies

Elmore Leonard is the author of Pagan Babies

Pagan Babies Full Details

Narrator Ron McLarty
Length 7 hours 30 minutes
Author Elmore Leonard
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date October 12, 2010
ISBN 9780061993848

Subjects

The publisher of the Pagan Babies is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Crime, Fiction

Additional info

The publisher of the Pagan Babies is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780061993848.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Daniel

May 28, 2020

For an Elmore Leonard book, Pagan Babies was a bit different in its subtlety. Most of the way through, it seemed atypical of his work. It was every bit as engaging, but it was almost too stayed, too calm in comparison to some of his other novels. But then the final chapters come into play and Leonard shines like a beacon of human unpredictability.The best way that I can describe Leonard’s writing is that he creates characters that we, the readers, will never be. He creates characters with values, hopes, and dreams that differ from our own, and he does it so well that their decisions fall in line with who his characters are while at the same time, causes us to gasp. And gasping through the words of a writer is a wonderful thing.The ending is perfect, complete with that feeling that comes when you believe you’re smarter than everyone around you only to find out that someone else saw right through you. Thank you, Elmore Leonard, for one more walk through the infinite variety of humanity and the unpredictability of the human mind as driven by the human spirit.

Jamie

October 18, 2022

If I said there was something so sweet about Bandits, so tenderhearted, well, this one’s of the same heart. A Rwandan genocide; a con man in Detroit. There’s just something about reading Elmore that puts me in mind of, bear with me, Somerset Maugham. Specifically, this one line Maugham wrote. About God, which is really about human nature, about how of all the things we’ll credit to him it’s not common-sense or tolerance. “If he knew as much about human nature as I do,” Maugham wrote, “he’d know how much goodness there is even in the worst and how much wickedness in the best.”Goodness in the worst; wickedness in the best. Pretty much.(At least if there’s a title that can follow A Feast of Snakes, it might be Pagan Babies. Terry: “There aren’t that many pagans anymore. They’ve all been converted to something. A lot of Seventh Day Adventists.”)

Sam

August 19, 2016

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.

Allan

June 07, 2012

Elmore Leonard is known for his sparse writing style--many of the chapters are nearly all dialog. For crime fiction, that works. Especially with his strong characters. Yeah, some of them were stock characters--all the mob guys and dishonest lawyers in the book. But two of the main ones were pretty unique: Father Dunn, a priest, witness to the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, lost and unclear what he can do to help, who is also an ex con-man fleeing the law. And Debbie Dewey, who spent three years in jail when she tried to murder her husband when he swindled her and is now trying to make it as a hip stand-up comedian, drawing on her prison experiences for material. The contrast between the brutality of the scene in Rwanda and the sometimes humorous inept mob scene in Detroit was also enough to keep me reading.An enjoyable tale, a fast read, good crime writing. Not Shakespeare, doesn't really say anything profound, but it's not trying to do that.Highly recommended.

Paul

March 10, 2021

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.

JS

March 10, 2013

If you're a priest, you can get away with murder. Or a big con. If you move back to the States to get away from the images of genocide in your head, meet an attractive ex-con who wants to do stand up, and play her scumbag ex and the mob for 250 grand. What's the harm? You're doing this for the Rwandan orphans, those brave kids who saw their parents get hacked to pieces. But, you're not really doing it for them. Or are you? And who is this girl you're with, who seems to totally get you and has cons of her own? Add in a simple contract hit guy and your childhood friend, the one who ratted you out on a cigarette smuggling operation that made you go to Africa in the first place, and you have Elmore Leonard's latest hangout novel of chatty criminals, criminal love, and general weirdness. In this novel, one character plans on robbing a store. He pulls back his coat to reveal his gun, the cashier girl says, "Yeah?" and he decides not to do it, thinking she's too dumb.We have an interesting idea--the juxtaposition of the usual Leonardian criminals and cons with the specter of a recent genocide. Why does he do this? As a joke to say that his regular characters have small first world problems and that their measly concerns don't really add up to hardship? Because these are small time killers and crooks, who want a little money. They don't hate each other enough to murder them. It's just business. And they deceive. They lie. Here people surprise you. They are not what they look like. In the genocide, if you were the wrong ethnicity, you knew where you stood. Things were honest. Things were much more direct. Here, back in Detroit, everyone is slippery and no one knows what they will do next. They make it up as they go along and they can change their minds.

Mark

June 11, 2015

Elmore Leonard books are always, at the very least, fun reads. I don't know that I'd list any of them among my very favorite novels, but of the ten or so I've read, none were bad, and most quite good.I knew nothing about "Pagan Babies" before getting into it, so the opening section came as a bit of a surprise: a priest hearing confessions in Rwanda shortly after the genocide of the early 1990s. But we leave the priest after a couple of chapters and head to Detroit, where the priest's brother works as a personal injury lawyer whose assistant just got out of jail for assaulting her ex, a low-level mobster; and we're in more familiar territory.The priest returns to the states, falls for his brother's assistant, who quickly figures out he isn't really a priest. The two of them come up with a scheme to extort money from her ex, who stole money from her before her attempted assault.Leonard's dialogue it almost goes without saying is excellent. As always when I read one of his novels, I found myself re-reading certain lines, continually impressed by the man's talent for writing believable, engaging conversation.

Joan

September 14, 2007

I love Elmore Leonard's unsavory characters who never get to steal much at all but take it all in good cheer. This is most interesting, being partly set in Rwanda where amoral Terry acts as a priest during the Civil War(and all the sensleless killings do bother him) but not quite enough that when he returns to American soil and meets a lovely girl scammer, he doesn't hatch a plan to raise money for those orphans and keep it for himself. It all works out to the reader's satisfaction.

Ramon4

March 27, 2019

Another good book by crime writer Elmore Leonard. ‘Pagan Babies’ is an entertaining short novel about cons tricking other cons, and everybody is thinking they are two steps ahead of the others. Nobody writes low-life street vernacular like Elmore Leonard. Terry Dunn had to flee arrest in Detroit. He drove a truck full of cigarettes for friends, but the friends were selling the cigarettes without paying the taxes. Did Terry know, or is it like he said, he simply drove the truck? In any case, Terry moved to Rwanda with the take from the cigarettes when the Feds started asking questions. Terry ‘became’ a priest, while the two friends went to prison. The ‘priest’ thing seemed interesting to Terry, until the Hutus began slaughtering Tutus in his church right in front of him. For some reason, the Hutus ignored him. Terry stayed in Rwanda, drinking and ministering to a congregation that no longer existed. He had a church full of murdered bodies which he was told could not be removed. Terry would hear occasional confessions, and say Mass on Easter and Christmas sometimes when asked.After delivering penance to a confessed murder, Terry returns to Detroit to visit with his brother and family. Terry’s brother is a lawyer and helps him clear up his troubles with the law.Through his brother, Terry meets Debbie Dewey, recently released from prison after doing 3 years for assault. She is now trying to make it as a stand-up comic. And she is trying to get money back from an ex-boyfriend who stole all her money. Terry says he intends to raise some money and go back to Rwanda. Terry and Debbie hit it off, and they believe that together, they can get $250,000 from Debbie’s ex boyfriend.Debbie’s ex-boyfriend has gotten in debt to the Mob, and has no intention of giving Debbie back her money.So the fun is reading how all these low-life characters are going to resolve their money problems and not get killed.While not as good as ‘Get Shorty’ or ‘Bandits’ this was a fun entertaining read, and I recommend it.

Jim

June 11, 2020

A very funny shaggy dog crime story set in Rwanda and Detroit. Elmore Leonard's Pagan Babies is about a Catholic priest who isn't really a priest who returns to his native Detroit with the stated intention of raising funds for Rwandan orphans, or is it really for himself or his ex-con accomplice Debbie Dewey, who has just gotten out of stir for doing a deliberate hit and run on her swinish ex-husband.The funniest thing about this book is the depiction of Detroit mafiosi and "made men" who have low double-digit IQs and the strange interactions between "Father Terry Dunn," Debbie Dewey, and the mob.

J.D.

September 09, 2018

The book opens in a Rwandan village five years after the genocide in which tens of thousands of Tutsis were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbors, many with feet and arms hiked off by machetes. Terry Dunn is a priest—or is he, really?—who witnesses the murders of 47 men, women, and children who had sought refuge in his church. Authorities have still not allowed the bodies to be removed, they rotted and were scattered and eaten by dogs and scavengers where they lay, still inside the church, now skeletons and fragments with scraps of cloth. “Father” Dunn has spent a lot of these past five years sitting in a lawn chair at his small house near the church, wearing rock band t shirts and drinking Johnny Walker Red, occasionally hearing confessions. Most of the book takes place in Detroit, where Dunn is from and to which he returns when his mother dies, becoming involved with various characters, crooks, and schemes surrounding fake fund raising for the pagan babies of Rwanda. It’s Elmore Leonard, right? His last act before leaving Rwanda is to go to the filthy, stinking banana beer house in the village, where 4 of the Hutus who had committed the murders and are now bragging it’s going to happen again. He calmly shoots each of them dead as they are trying to get up from the table—Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Then, classic Elmore Leonard (I love the man): with the deafening sounds of the shots still ringing in the cramped cement block room, Dunn makes the sign of the cross with his extended arm still holding the 9mm, then says, “Burn in hell, motherfuckers.” Read Elmore Leonard! You’ll be glad you did.

C.

December 28, 2019

This is my first Elmore Leonard book, so I came to it without expectations or comparisons to his other work. All of the characters came with the complexity that life imbues "real" humans with--a dash of goodness, but mostly self-serving and conniving. The most loyal act in the story came from a minor character named Johnny who refunded money to a hit man and tried to save his friend with a warning. The strength of this book was definitely the characters and dialogue. Leonard gave the Mutt some of the best lines, but there were a couple of scenes where Debbie and the mob boss rocked.

Jock

December 26, 2020

An oldie but a goodie. It's been a long time since I've read an Elmore Leonard book and this book made me wonder why I haven't read more. It was a quick but most enjoyable read - interesting and kind of quirky characters, fast paced, an intriguing plot with some unexpected twists. (Guess that's why they're twists.)

Brad

January 06, 2023

Great characters, punchy dialogue and triple crosses. Classic Leonard!

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