Award-winning documentary maker, Dara Barr, and her right-hand man, Xavier LeBo, arrive in Djibouti to make a film about Somali pirates. What they get instead are al-Qaeda terrorists, an elephant gun, a model with a smart mouth, the CIA, a billionaire playboy who wants to be a spy, freedom-fighting pirates, horny goat weed and a highly explosive gas tanker.
It's a cool story that is made for the big screen. There's lots of snappy, funny dialogue and I could see the various action sequences in my mind as I read. Leonard even gets a bit meta every now and again as the main characters discuss who would play each part. The author also plays with the structure of the book, starting with a few narrative chapters that set the scene before jumping forward in time and having Dara and Xavier retell the story to each other as they edit the footage shot at sea. For me, this didn't work and I felt it bogged the story down. Thankfully, after everything is caught up to the present, the book picks up pace again and Leonard launches confidently into the finale with Dara and co. hunting a terrorist, the terrorist hunting them, and both groups trying to blow up a hijacked tanker.
I think I was unfortunate in picking Djibouti as my first Elmore Leonard book and I suspect that I picked a dud. There was more than enough material here to make a funny, fast paced thriller but it felt kind of meh and not really what I was expecting from an author as loved as Elmore Leonard.
Read On: I will give Elmore Leonard another chance and read one of his better known books, perhaps Get Shorty or Freaky Deaky.
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