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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780060085636
ISBN number: 0060085630
Label: HarperTorch
Manufacturer: HarperTorch
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 416
Printing Date: August 01, 2002
Publishing house: HarperTorch
Release Date: July 30, 2002
Sale Popularity Level: 166366
Studio: HarperTorch
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Product Description:
After serving time for armed robbery, Ernest 'Stick' Stickley is back on the outside and trying to stay legit. But it's tough staying straight in a crooked town -- and Miami is a pirate's paradise, where investment fat cats and lowlife drug dealers hold hands and dance. And when a crazed player chooses Stick at random to die for another man's sins, the struggling ex-con is left with no choice but to dive right back into the game. Besides, Stick knows a good thing when he sees it -- and a golden opportunity to run a very profitable sweet revenge scam seems much too tasty to pass up.
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Rated by buyers 
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Every Elmore Leonard book is terrific. This book continues the outstanding characterizations and dialogue that have earned Leonard the reputation of best living crime writer, perhaps of all time.
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as always the dialogue is only as he does it along with the fast moving plot, I also fell for a new to me author Michelle CozzensIt's Not Your Mother's Bridge Club
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this is one of the great elmore leonard books.
whilst they are all worth reading the period earlier than the 80s can now put up variable results, when compred to his classic string of consecutive winners.
this mid 70s book has not dated, and is still taut and terrific.
i re-read this every now and then, and will highly reccomend it for elmore fans and 1st time samplers alike.
Rated by buyers -
Elmore Leonard's STICK embraces Miami Beach with a love touched with psychotic evil. The beauty of the beach scene glistens with a patina of drug addiction and sexual perversity---just the right combination for this taut, tempting thriller.
Our hero "Stick" has all the street smarts gleaned from his seven year prison sentence. Now at-large and looking for work, Stick infiltrates the Miami drug scene and 'sticks' himself to it like a barnacle. Working from the inside, he meets low-lifes, killers, drug lords and the attorneys and business agents that keep the whole illegal monstrosity afloat.
Not one to be easily intimidated, Stick probes for secrets he can use to make himself some money. Along the way he finds love and guilt-free sex. We readers are just along for the ride and we ensconce ourselves in the backseats of the expensive cars he chauffeurs, taking in the tension and off-beat humour on this fantastic trip through the Miami underworld.
by Larry Rochelle, author of BLUE ICE, GULF GHOST and HOME SCHOOLED
Rated by buyers 
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Near the end of this 1983 novel, Ernest Stickley's prospective love interest tags him as "basically a straight-shooter, within your own frame of values," thus defining the protagonist of nearly every Leonard book I have read. There's a bit of the same-old formula here, which some may love more than me.
Of course, this isn't the very first time Leonard has featured Stickley in a novel. He appeared a few years before in "Swag," as half of a robbery partnership. Now alone again, and out of prison, Stickley finds himself quickly on the wrong side of a Florida drug deal gone bad. Though wanted, Stickley wants something, too, the money he was promised for delivering the merchandise, and in a roundabout way that involves working as a chauffeur for a shady businessman, he sets about getting it.
"Swag" was a good book, with flashes of real brilliance. There you stayed for the ambiance and the dialogue but found yourself swept along by a plot that became more intricate and clever by the page. I think Leonard was after a similar effect here, only half succeeding. The central story involving the drug dealers grabs you, but then takes a back seat as Leonard puts Stickley and the reader inside a large estate along Biscayne Bay, where stock touting and mistress shuffling are S.O.P. under the shade of the acacia trees.
Leonard has a lot of fun introducing us to the goofy household where Stick lies low for a while. Colorful writing predominates as owner Barry Stam endlessly works the phones playing the market while trying to impress Stick with his street attitude, which Stick finds too forced by half. Stick finds Stam's wife and mistress more to his liking.
At one point, Stam introduces some of his druglord buddies to a movie producer who wants their financial backing for his latest picture. It's the book's funniest, most memorable moment, with the producer picking the wrong time for some ethnic humour as he flogs an unpromising film about a pair of undercover Miami cops doing battle with drug smugglers called "Shuck And Jive."
Leonard clearly sends up some choice moments he had dealing with obtuse Hollywood money men over the years. It's interesting also to note that the idea, however half-baked, does sound a lot like the TV series "Miami Vice," launched just a year after this book was published to great fanfare that seemed to spill over to Leonard's novels, starting with his 1985 breakout classic "Glitz."
But "Stick" never works as well in the crime fiction department. It's not bad, just weird in the wrong places. The villains don't seem to know why they want Stick dead, while Stick isn't looking for money or revenge as much as some ill-defined sense of honor, which is expressed in the various ways he takes to crushing one of the villain's cowboy hats. The result is a book cruising on attitude in lieu of a plot. I still don't get how Stick thought he was going to get away with his plan, which seems to fall together rather haphazardly.
"Stick" was later made into a Burt Reynolds movie, memorable only for one famous stunt which shows up here in far less spectacular form. It's par for the course with a book that promises more than it delivers.
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