Gold Coast is one of Elmore Leonard's best character studies in the guise of a crime thriller. You could also call it a crime thriller in the guise of a character study. I am not sure. Elmore really does spin a tall tale here. Karen DiCillia, an attractive widow in her forties, cannot seem to maintain relationships with men. She hits it off with them on the first meeting but then they seem to back off for no good reason. Upon some deep digging, she discovers that her dead Italian gangster husban...

Published in 1980, Gold Coast is another great early crime novel from Elmore Leonard. At the heart of the story is a forty-four-year-old woman named Karen DeCilia who, several years earlier, made the mistake of marrying a mobster. She's living a live of apparent luxury on Florida's Gold Coast, but it's an empty life in which she's totally dependent on her husband, Frank. But when Frank suddenly and unexpectedly dies, Karen finds herself a very wealthy widow with a chance now to live her own life...

The best Elmore Leonard novel I've read since embarking upon my marathon re-read.Karen DiCilia has been married to Frank -a high-ranking Mafiosi elder- for eight years when he suffers a killer heart attack and dies. Karen and Frank had recently had a fight after Karen discovers that Frank has been carrying on an affair with a female real estate agent. Karen asks Frank how he would like it if she had an extra-marital affair. Frank takes such a prospect as a threat.Upon Frank's death Karen inherit...

This is quite an old, neglected Elmore Leonard thriller but absolutely one of my faves of the 15 or so I've read by him. As always, the dialogue crackles with authentic life and the intricate plot comes together nicely. And there's a right nasty bastard to hate through it all. Top class crime writing.

Graham Greene used to describe some of his novels as “entertainments” distinguishing them from his more literary efforts. There are times where all I want from a novel is entertainment. When I was working and there was something particularly stressful going on, I might just need a diversion. More often now, it is simply adjusting the mix of what I have been reading. I may have just read something I didn’t care for, something that was intriguing but a bit dry or something that was long and challe...

2.5 stars.Title this review, “The Time One of My Favorite Authors Wrote a Book I Didn’t Like Very Much.”It happens. R.E.M. gives us Around the Sun, Quentin Tarantino writes and directs Death Proof, Michael Fassbender appears in Jonah Hex. Even our most reliable artists stumble from time to time – it would be unreasonable to expect otherwise – and with any luck, they recover. That’s largely how I feel about Gold Coast, a book that seems to have something on its mind but doesn’t execute very well....

So much fun. Right on page 9, what I love about Elmore: Karen, “Playing a role and enjoying it. It was real.”Or page 61, Maguire in a rant after my own heart: “I didn’t say I didn’t like it, I said it wasn’t real. It’s like a refuge. Nothing can happen to you there, you’re safe. But it’s got nothing to do with reality. It’s like you’re given security, but in exchange for it you have to give up yourself. You have to become somebody else.”Getting it, even in the stories that are just pure fun, the...

this is something like the...15th, 16th from leonard for me...kindle edition.dedicated: for bill leonardstory begins:one day karen dicilia put a few observations together and realized her husband frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in boca.karen knew where they were doing it, too. in one of the condominiums frank owned, part of oceana estates.time & place*florida...fort lauderdale...miami...miami beach*karen's present address, 1 isla bahia...the harbor beach section of lauderdale*detroit...

I was a little disappointed with this one. Leonard is one of my heroes, and I just couldn't get into this one. I was all for Cal's role in the story because he seemed like a decent guy in spite of some of the choices he made, but Karen as a protagonist was just unlikeable. Stick up her ass the entire book, and the ending was both unexpected and a let-down after getting through the rest of the book. I was surprised because I had heard this was one of the really good ones to add to the Elmore Leon...

This is my first Elmore Leonard, and I must say that I was extremely disappointed. The book started with a storyline, which seemed interesting but went nowhere. There are a number of curious characters, well-fleshed out, but the plot is incredibly thin. It was only when I researched the author and discovered that he was a prolific writer of screenplays that the whole thing clicked. What I was reading was a movie, not a book! Need I say any more.

I’ve read some really harsh reviews of this book here on Goodreads and I just don’t understand. This is Elmore Leonard and this is what he does. He usually has a two-bit shit-bag like Rowland, and Rowland is up there among the best two-bit shit-bags. He’s just aching to rape and kill yet he exercises a bit of restraint to further his bigger plan, which is never really revealed.I listened to the fantastic audio-book narrated by the late great Frank Muller when I was out riding my bike, and read t...

Heart o' Gold Coast -- Crime Blanc GenreSoft-headed types love characters with a Heart o' Gold. You know: Robin Hood, Jean Val Jean, Otto Skorzeny, Obama, Jesus, &c. That's why people like this book. Fully half of the characters in this book would stuff parking meters for strangers and give food to starving orphans. Cal is a completely unbelievable character. And for many reasons. He's got enough 70's TV-show boxes checked to get you an "A" on your SATs. I suspect TV-lovers will find him charmin...

Elmore Leonard was ethically a little slippery; some of his novels show a strong sense of moral principle; others are pretty frankly amoral, even if they acknowledge differing degrees of bad. This is one of the latter. There's not much here that's uplifting, but if you enjoy a glimpse into the way crooks operate, told with detachment and a touch of humor, it's pretty entertaining.Karen DiCilia is the widow of a mob boss in Florida; her jealous husband left a proviso in his will that strips her o...

As with most Leonard books, the ride is so much more satisfying than the end. Elmore Leonard could literally end this book after any chapter and I wouldn't care. It was a great story and the characters spew out wonderful lines page after page. He is a poet of street language. Really enjoyed it.

I first read this book years ago, and then tossed it aside, not realizing its important place in the Leonard canon: It's the first one he set in Florida, a state he'd been visiting for years and a place where he'd bought his mother a hotel to run. Leonard's quirky tale of a swamp-bred psychopath, a robber-turned-dolphin-trainer and a Mafia widow with an odd problem also marked a bridge between Charles Willeford's offbeat Hoke Mosely thrillers and the wackier Carl Hiaasen crime novels that began

Funny dialogue, break-neck pacing, interesting characters, bla bla bla... I'm having problems finding new ways to describe "good Elmore Leonard books" which is very ironic cuz Leonard himself had, at this point, found a good way to capitalize on his strengths on and churn out roughly the same book every year but making it a damn good time with every outing. Special note to the appearance of Roland Crowe, first appearance of a member of the Florida Crowes, those delightful screw-ups from Justifie...

2018 reread: Another book that I loved even more on a reread. It's a toss up which 1980 Elmore Leonard book I like more, this or City Primeval. I'm trying to avoid recency bias so I won't say it's this one.A vindictive husband leaves his wife with incredible strictures in his will. Several people are attempting to bilk her out of her money or to save her. It all unravels in Leonard's inimitable style. Just great character and dialog driven noir.

An interesting premise: A mob boss's wife is left a fortune after he suddenly keels over. The catch is she can't ever be with another man, and he has his wiseguys around to make sure she remains faithful. Of course it's not long before the wiseguys start sniffing around the pile of dough. Leonard's good characters and dialog keep the story moving, but the plot unravels a little bit, and the end was unsatisfying for me.

Eh, this book was okay. Nothing spectacular. Very stereotypical characters, and the dead guy forcing his wife to be celibate for the rest of her life was rather strange. Oh, the trials of being a mob boss' wife. After a while, I was getting very tired of Roland using the word "dink." Hadn't heard that in a long time, and it was VERY much overused at the end.

What a good read, I couldn't put the book down - unless forced to by work!It is easy to read, characters are either like able or you want to have a shower to remove the creepiness of them. The revenge of a dead husband putting a chastity belt on his 44 year old wife and the story that unfolds.Read it, enjoy all the way to the very last page!

Unsatisfying. This has put me off Leonard for a while - can't be bothered reading the next two I had lined up, I'll have to wait till the bad taste this one left in my mouth has dissipated - there were no likable characters in this and it seemed to end with no definitive resolution. In fact, I hated it.

Another great story from Elmore Leonard. With the mob involved, a beautiful widow in need of help, and with the help of a drifter and ex-con, she fights back. Leonard was one of the finest writers of crime fiction, and in his heyday I would say the finest.

The actual plot was pretty good, and there are some laugh-out-loud moments, but I found the writing a bit jarring.

like character of Jimmy Cap pictorialized in passage, 'Roland didn't care anything about historical sites. He got a plate of fettuccini with clam sauce, a big glass of red and some rolls, and went over to sit with Jimmy Capotorto in the Florida room that was full of plants hanging all over, like a green-house.' 'Roland said, "It's a bitch, huh, something like this? Man, you never know." 'Jimmy Cap had finished eating. He was smoking a cigar, looking out at the Bay, five miles across to South Mia...

Now this is a solid Elmore Leonard novel. This book has it all, a hitman, the mob, a mysterious woman and a man in over his head. All classic Leonard tropes, but when he can fit them all together in a clever, entertaining way, damn, no one does it better.The plot follows Karen, a woman stuck in a loveless marriage to a mobster. But when he dies she finds herself trapped in a clause of his will forbidding her from being with anyone else hence she loses her millions of dollars. In walks our Leonar...

When I get stuck in a reading rut, I usually go to Elmore Leonard, whose novels are dependable, quick reads that I almost always enjoy. Like most authors, there's a similarity to his works, and he fell into traps when he got lazy, but it's not like he can write Out of Sight every time.One of these traps he fell into was "pick a job, and somehow drop a criminal into it." This is how we got the high diver in Tishomingo Blues or psychic in Riding the Rap. It worked in Get Shorty with the movie prod...

A kind of middling Florida-set Leonard novel, about a new widow who learns that her husband put into the will that she should be celibate (to honor him) till she dies. There's an off-white knight who wants to save her and a bad guy who wants to trap her even more, and they sort of fight it out with the usual Leonard hijinks. It's good enough, but there's something unclear here-- there are a lot of moments when you feel like you don't quite know the widow yet, and at the end of the novel, after a...

Oh Elmore Leonard, one of my absolute favorites in the crime field (and his Westerns are good too). He really has a talent for keeping his writing tight, his plots compelling and fast moving, his characters well defined. There are shades of moral gray in his work but you always know the good guys from the bad guys, and Gold Coast is no exception. The story of a mob widow and two criminals who end up in her orbit in Fort Lauderdale, Gold Coast actually improves on some Leonard in the area of the

Karen Hill is boxed in by restrictions her husband set on her social life upon his death: She can’t leave Miami, and she also can’t date anyone — or else she can’t keep her $4 million inheritance.Roland Crowe, one of Leonard’s more threatening bad dudes, wants his hands on the widow’s cash … and he wants the widow. She relies on a wily younger man to plot a way out.“Gold Coast” fits in with Elmore Leonard’s tales of stupid criminals that are caught up in situations they don’t quite know how to m...

The problem with this story was primarily that the main antagonist was dull. His whole plan was that he thought he was going to low key charm his way into some money, except he wasn't actually charming and really only predator. Now, unfortunately, it's become clear that a lot of these bad, immoral, dumb people actually do succeed way to often with this sort of thing, but that doesn't make the story any more interesting. It might have been passable a hundred pages shorter, but instead it just dra...