Wasn't too fond of the ending but overall a good Hard case crime novel.

mmmm ~ pulpy! Not Block's best, by far, but what the heck.

Five Americans are hired to go to Cuba and assassinate Fidel Castro, the survivors splitting $100,000. Two of the five join revolutionaries in the hills, two hole up and build a bomb, and the last rents a hotel room overlooking the site of one of Fidel's speeches. Can any of them get the job done?

While Killing Castro isn't my favorite of Lawrence Block's Hard Case books, it's also not the worst. Some of the characters are a little thin but each one is fairly reallistic. There's also a little smut, not surprising since Block wrote a lot of that kind of thing back in the day.

The best parts of Killing Castro? Watching Block develop as a writer and experiment with different techniques. I enjoyed the way he shifted viewpoints between characters and I also liked the way he paralleled the events in the story with an account of Fidel Castro's rise to power.

All in all, an easy read and an entertaining way to spend a few hours reading.

Despite only clocking in at around 200 pages in length, this tight thriller, about a group of five would-be assassins sent to kill Fidel Castro in the early 1960s, gives each assassin's point-of-view as they prepare for the task at hand -- each with their own individual motivations and using different methods -- as well as interspersing that with true biographical information about Castro and his rise to power. Not the pinnacle of Block's much-lauded work, but an impressive accomplishment considering he did it as work-for-hire under a pseudonym from a second-rate publisher that handed him the title, plot, and a $1,500 check and probably didn't care what the finished product looked like.

Not [a:Lawrence Block|17613|Lawrence Block|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1303856083p2/17613.jpg]'s best work, but still Block. Well written and satisfying. Good light airplane reading.

The device of switching perspective across the characters was interesting and well-done.

mmmm ~ pulpy! Not Block's best, by far, but what the heck.

Damn good international-political-crime thriller by the damn good Lawrence Block. Follows a number of important characters through a fairly short book, so it feels much like a series of intertwined novellas. But whatever you call it, I loved it. It's fantastically sleazy, violent as hell and lit up with a twelve-pack of nasty. This is utterly hard-boiled stuff -- bitter and beautiful.

Block wrote this in 1961 and it feels remarkably alive to read it today. It's particularly interesting viewed alongside [a:James Ellroy|2887|James Ellroy|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1208267994p2/2887.jpg]'s [b:American Tabloid|36064|American Tabloid|James Ellroy|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1168680757s/36064.jpg|35975], part of which covers the same ground and has a very similar voice. Weirdly, because I rather thought of Ellroy's voice in that book as being unique. Block writes more fluidly, less choppily, but there's a lot of Killing Castro in American Tabloid, which I found way interesting because I love that book.

If you have yet to discover Block, reading this or his [b:Grifter's Game|380569|Grifter's Game (Hard Case Crime #1)|Lawrence Block|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1183504844s/380569.jpg|3261476] could make you a convert. Two very different books, both among the best in the genre.