I wasn’t all that into the last couple of Elmore Leonard novels I read, so it was nice to find Cuba Libre, which fuses Leonard’s brisk capers with his background in westerns. The story takes place in Cuba in 1898, before and during the Spanish-American War. Ben Tyler, a cowpoke and bank robber recently released from Yuma prison, teams up with an old friend to run guns to the Cuban rebels under the guise of horse trading. Things go expectedly awry, and Tyler becomes enmeshed in a plot to defraud a wealthy sugar merchant of $40,000 paid off for a phony kidnapping.
The story has all the trappings you’d expect from an Elmore Leonard novel: a rugged outlaw for a lead, a steamy romance, snappy dialog, double-crossings, a bastard villain who gets what’s coming to him, a scheme and schemers on both sides. He writes as always like a man who would rather die than be called lyrical, but who’s too talented to write dry. A good book.