Killshot

By: Elmore Leonard

Narrated by: Bruce Boxleitner

Length: 2 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

It's not Carmen Colson and her ironworker husband Wayne's fault that they were in the real estate office when a pair of thugs walked in with extortion on their minds. But as far as aging Ojibway Indian hitman Armand Degas is concerned, the Colsons are going to have to pay dearly for seeing too much, and for the damage Wayne inflicted on Armand and his sicko partner Richie Nix with a tire iron. The cops here in middle-of-nowhere Michigan can't help Carmen and Wayne out, and the best the Feds can offer is the Witness Protection Program. So ultimately it's going to have to come down to one wife, one husband, two killers, and one lethal shot.

©1989 Elmore Leonard (P)2006 Phoenix Audio

Critic reviews

"Masterful...gemlike...bone-chilling." (Los Angeles Times Book Review)
"Crime fiction doesn't get any better....A bravura performance." (Publishers Weekly)

Hardcore

I haven't read the book, so not sure how much surgery was done to the abridgment. That said, this is Leonard at the top of his form: a trained ear for the nuance of the everyday, and spare confident prose to die for. A quirky story complexly told to sound simple. Plus, a reader who's equally good in his own right. Definitely worth it.

A good one a one shot story

I loved listening in one sitting. The characters were perfect, the story right to cool. You get into the characters and breath along with all of them including the whiny mother who you might want to kick. Thanks for a great listen!

Killshot

I generally like Elmore Leonard and his dry sense of humor, and fully expected to enjoy this book. Although the audio reading is really very good and thoroughly listenable, I am sorry to say that what little there is of a story is plain disappointing.

Killshot is not so much a story, as a character sketch of some cold, heartless murders. I found myself plain going through the ordeal of listening through it for the simple reason that I paid for this audio program, and come hell or high water, I'd listen to it through to the end. I expected that eventually there would be some redeeming feature to this tale, and I guess that eventually there is... but just a little.

Totally forgettable

Any additional comments?

Two thugs enter a real estate office to fulfill an extortion scheme, and a woman and her husband see too much and become targets. People I respect love this book, so maybe I didn’t get it. But I found it totally forgettable. Bechdel test: fail.