Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Pagan Babies by Elmore Leonard Pagan Babies. In Rwanda during the genocide, Hutu thugs storm into a church and kill everyone except Father Terry Dunn, on the alter saying his first mass. He's powerless to do anything about it--until one day he faces several of the killers and exacts a chilling penance. But is Terry Dunn really a priest? He doesn't always appear to act like one. He comes home to Detroit and runs into Debbie Dewey who's doing standup at a comedy club. In her set, Debbie tells what it was like in prison, down for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Terry and Debbie hit it off; they have the same sense of humor and similar goals in that both are out to raise money. Terry says for the Little Orphans of Rwanda; Debbie to score off a guy who conned her out of sixty-seven thousand dollars. This is Randy, now wealthy, who runs a fashionable restaurant and is connected to the Detroit Mafia. It's Debbie who keeps praying until she learns the bizarre truth about Terry; Debbie who sells him on going in together for a much bigger payoff than either could manage alone. What happened in Rwanda remains alive through the unexpected twists and turns of the plot. But even with this tragic background. Pagan Babies comes off as Leonard's funniest straight-faced novel to date. THE CHURCH HAD BECOME a tomb where forty-seven bodies turned to leather and stains had been lying on the concrete floor the past five years, though not lying where they had been shot with Kalashnikovs or hacked to death with machetes. The benches had been removed and the bodies reassembled: men, women and small children laid in rows of skulls and spines, femurs, fragments of cloth stuck to mummified remains, many of the adults missing feet, all missing bones that had been carried off by scavenging dogs. Since the living would no longer enter the church, Fr. Terry Dunn heard confessions in the yard of the rectory, in the shade of old pines and silver eucalyptus trees. "Bless me, Fatha, for I have sin. It has been two months from the last time I come to Confession. Since then I am fornicating with a woman from Gisenyi three times only and this is all I have done. They would seem to fill their mouths with the English words, pronouncing each one carefully, with an accent Terry . Pagan Babies. A priest with a cooler-than-thou attitude, a sexy wannabe stand-up comedienne with a grudge, a wiseguy with a bleeding heart and the dumbest hit-man in literature join forces to fantastic effect in Elmore Leonard's delicious new caper. Returning from a 'missionary position' in Rwanda, Father Terry needs to raise money for his pagan babies. What better way of doing this is there than shaking down the mob? Teaming up with fast- talking Debbie Dewey seems like a good idea, but as the wiseguys wise up and the bullets start to fly, who's fooling who? Filled with Leonard's trademark crackling dialogue and whiplash plot turns, this new novel is an instant classic from one of the most respected writers around. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. A vintage roller-coaster ride from 'the hottest thriller writer in the US' [Time] From the Back Cover : Father Terry Dunn thought he'd seen everything on the mean streets of Detroit, but that was before he went on a little retreat to Rwanda to evade a tax-fraud indictment. Now the whiskey-drinking, Nine Inch Nails-T-shirt-wearing padre is back trying to hustle up a score to help the little orphans of Rwanda. But the fund-raising gets complicated when a former tattletale cohort pops up on Terry's tail. And then there's the lovely Debbie Dewey. A freshly sprung ex-con turned stand-up comic, Debbie needs some fast cash too, to settle an old score. Now they're in together for a bigger payoff than either could finagle alone. After all, it makes sense . unless Father Terry is working a con of his own. Pagan Babies by Elmore Leonard. Leonard's Big Score. Reviewed by Frederick Zackel. At 74 years of age, Elmore Leonard is a living American treasure. In 36 novels over the past half-century, he has demonstrated that when you step outside the law, you have stepped into a very chaotic, violent universe that can also be very, very funny. His latest bestselling novel, Pagan Babies , is another genuine high point in a career that already includes Hombre , Out of Sight and Get Shorty . But what gets me is that, if he weren't so damn successful as a writer of page-turners (as the New York publishing houses call them), elitist academics and lit-crits would have recognized by now that he is a toiler on the same spiritual highway as that deified literary great Flannery O'Connor. Leonard may be known as the Dickens of Detroit (I think Stephen King started that nickname), but don't let his Michigan residency fool you -- his heart and soul lie on the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line. When I interviewed him three years ago, Leonard told me that in his youth, "I read Flannery O'Connor, and maybe she influenced me as a Southern writer. I always felt more a Southern writer, closer to the South than I am to being a crime writer. Oh, I read Hammett and Chandler. Hammett was OK. I read Chandler, certainly, but I didn't learn anything from him. "I write crime , not mysteries," Leonard qualifies. "I don't read mysteries. I never cared who did it. I think the bad guy is more fun than the good guy. And in mysteries there's a puzzle, and puzzles don't interest me. Mysteries are all plot; plot doesn't interest me." Consider that Leonard was born the same year as Flannery O'Connor -- 1925. (She died in 1964.) They both spent their most formative years in the South, O'Connor in Milledgeville, Georgia, and Leonard in Memphis, Tennessee. "I loved Memphis," Leonard says. He cried when his family moved to Detroit. He was then 9 years old. Both writers were reared Roman Catholic. O'Connor became a fundamentalist Catholic, for lack of a better definition. For her, we are all blighted by Original Sin. We are all God's screw-ups and we all desperately need redemption. She felt that Christians should live every moment in the shadow of Death, who will arrive -- in the words of Christ -- "like a thief in the night." Leonard went to Catholic schools from first grade on. This included the University of Detroit High School (where he says he "learned how to think") and the University of Detroit, both Jesuit institutions. He attended Mass daily until the early 1970s, when he felt the need to join Alcoholics Anonymous and substituted that program's principles for the Catholic Church's disciplines. (He now attends Mass infrequently.) In AA, he explains, "you try to develop a direct relationship with God, or a higher power, as you understand the concept. The main idea of the program is to 'let go and let God,' to get rid of your hang-ups and try to live your everyday life as an instrument of God's purpose, and that is to show love to one another." Leonard joined AA in 1974, "but it took three years for the program to sink in. Finally on January 24, 1977, I had my last drink." Leonard writes hard-boiled crime fiction the way Flannery O'Connor writes hard-boiled crime in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Compare O'Connor's Misfit with any of Leonard's gothic villains, whether it's the Oklahoma Wildman, Clement Mansell, from City Primeval , Mama's Boy Teddy Magyk from Glitz , or any of his Florida loony crackers named Crowe. The fact that they can be compared is because both Leonard and O'Connor grew up with the same sensational, real-life killers. During my first interview with him on May 23, 1997, Leonard offhandedly pointed out that it was the 63rd anniversary of the day Bonnie (Parker) and Clyde (Barrow) were shot to death on an Oklahoma road, ending their legendary careers as Depression-era holdup artists. That he knew the anniversary date so readily surprised even Leonard. "I read somewhere that the most impressionable age for children is between 5 and 10," he told me. "I was between 5 and 10 when all those desperadoes were roaming the Midwest and holding up banks. They were kind of folk heroes. So many homes and farms had been repossessed, taken back by the banks, that when the banks were robbed, people cheered. And they could forgive the desperadoes for killing someone who occasionally got in the way. Those bank robbers of the 30s truly influenced me. John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd -- that's what I'm doing today." Not exactly robbing banks, but writing about folks who could. Who do. Who do worse than that. Although their details can be engrossing and memorable, the basic plot of every Elmore Leonard novel is the same: A handful of poseurs -- role- players at villainy -- meet up, compare notes on their bizarre past histories, find themselves compatible in their approach to criminality and then decide to become partners and go for a Big Score. Before the game is over, these wannabes will cross paths with somebody who isn't role- playing, who isn't play-acting, who is as ruthless as they only imagine they can be.