The Death and Life of Bobby Z

My third Don Winslow book, and I'm three-for-three for enjoyment! Another quick and exciting read! Tim Kearney gets a chance to get out of jail if he becomes the legend, Bobby Z. He agrees, and all hell breaks loose! Everyone is out to kill him, he fall in love, and he discovers "he" has a kid! Bikers, drug dealers, and the DEA will stop at nothing to kill him, and he'll stop at nothing to keep the woman and kid in his life! And the end? Well, it's fireworks man!

This was a truly fast and entertaining read. Our protagonist, Tim Kearney, is something very akin to Inspector Clouseau, man so very much out of his depth but with that streak of luck and raw instinct that makes him survive under the most impossible conditions ever.

Forced by DEA to impersonate a very powerful marijuana kingpin (using the fact that mentioned kingpin is dead) Tim gets involved in weird exchange with Mexican narco cartel where he is to be exchanged for the blown undercover police agent. But when this exchange goes down in a very very bad way Tim will have to find a way to survive because it is obvious everybody has something against the guy he is impersonating - cartels, crime network he left after his death, his love show more interest (or interests?) to name the few - plus we have people that want Tim dead because he is Tim ... not this other guy.

So underestimated by all parties involved Tim will prove a touch nut to crack (I mean how much do we know about people, right? This must be question in the head of the DEA officers during this entire novel :)) and end game is nothing short of epic.

Level of action, twists, bad guys getting surprised and blown away (and ever growing "street cred" for our boy Tim) makes this material that just flies from the pages. There are few steamy sex scenes too but they just feel organic to the whole plot, this disaster waiting to happen on every turn. At the end of each chapter you just can see Tim escaping the most certain death by the skin of his teeth.

Very enjoyable book, great action adventure novel. I haven't seen the movie so cannot give any comparison here but give yourself a treat and read the novel.

Highly recommended to all fans of crime fiction. show less

I wish they had 3.5-star reviews.

This is high-octane easy-reading completely implausible crime fiction that goes down easy. It's almost perfect for what it is -- which is fundamentally lightweight but a lot of fun regardless.

One of those rare books whose laudatory cover blurbs actually bear some relation to the contents inside, The Death and Life of Bobby Z is the hair-raising, addictive and frequently funny story of ex-Marine, Gulf War vet, three time loser Tim Kearney attempting to make good on a deal from a crooked DEA agent to impersonate the deceased surfer-cum-pot smuggler par excellence named Bobby Z ("Z" for "Zacharias" -- with apologies to Robert C. O'Brien) to escape a certain death behind prison walls following on from Kearney's neat assassination of a Hell's Angel/Aryan Brotherhood bruiser. The pitch-perfect dialogue shifts from California slacker to hard-nosed cattle rancher to pompous, self-styled hidalgo-hood with barely a bobble, and the show more rogues gallery is filled to bursting with off-the-reservation feds, movie-obsessed pedophiles, Eurotrash, bikers, cholos, and war vets, many of whom converge in a kind of perfect storm in the book's hellzapoppin' finale. Behind all the mayhem, buckets of black humor, jaw-dropping escapes, explicit sex and rampant profanity lurks a sweet, sentimental optimism and a message of hope and redemption that would not be out of place on the most flowery and ostentatiously religious greeting card, and it is to Winslow's credit that this comes across as part of an organic whole, not an afterthought bit of moralizing á la Scarface: The Shame of a Nation. show less

A fun romp of a book written with a sure hand. A con who is facing death at the hand of other disgruntled cons jumps at the chance to escape prison when a DEA agent asks him to impersonate a drug dealer. At least he has a chance of staying alive, if a slim one. What follows is exciting, violent, hilarious, and touching, with many double and triple crosses.

This one didn't grab me immediately but was well worth sticking with. It's funny and frantic and really good. Tim Kearney is a real looser. As he says he's great at breaking and entering. It's breaking, entering and EXITING that he hasn't perfected. He keeps getting caught. Then in prison he has to kill a Hell's Angel so now even his life in prison is in jeopardy. He's offered an out - just impersonate a drug dealer for a trade for a government agent. He takes the deal and the story takes off. It doesn't sound funny, I know, but… trust me.

Tim Kearney, ex-marine and career small-time criminal is sprung from a life sentence by the DEA to impersonate Bobby Z, a ghostly major drug dealer. That's the simple part. There's much more intrigue, with deals and counter deals, with much back-stabbing and murder, and a kid - The son the real Bobby Z never knew he had. So Tim is trying to stay alive and keep Bobby Z's son - his son - safe while they're being tracked by the DEA, bikers and Mexican Cartel killers. A well-paced California thriller.