Killing Castro

Killing Castro by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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.

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