(1978) The Switch
1978-01-01
The premise of this novel is that a couple of criminals get the bright idea to kidnap the wife of an embezzling construction businessman, in the hopes of blackmailing him for the money he has stashed away in the Carribean. Unfortunately for them, he's less motivated to make a deal than they would hope, seeing as he's had a mistress for years, and was about to divorce his wife anyways.
This is less high-stakes than other Leonard novels I've read, but still quite entertaining. As always, the dialogue and characterization is on point, and the pacing is quite well done. In particular, there's a strong female character in the kidnapped wife, who manages to be quite compelling and interesting, and holds her own against the kidnappers. Leonard gives her a lot of interiority, which is atypical from what I've read of him so far. He does use character point-of-view to tint his third-person narrative in other stories, but here he uses that same device to a much further extent, often writing sentences which cannot be construed as anything else than the direct train-of-thought of the character herself.
My only gripe with the novel is that it feels a bit aimless in retrospective, with the ending being so much of a punchline that it almost trivializes the rest of the novel, making it seem like a contrived device to deliver the joke. Nonetheless, great stuff from Leonard as always.