Saturday, January 23, 2021

Rereading: Kahawa by Westlake

Kahawa is an adventure-cum-heist novel set in Idi Amin's Uganda. A crew of thieves steal a train loaded with coffee (not rob, steal). 

I read this in the 80s and liked it, but remembered almost nothing about it. How does it hold up? Reasonably well. It’s grimmer and more serious than Westlake usually is, but the story has many good things. The real problem is it’s too long, almost 500 pages. There are also some irritating short snatches of crude pornography. The main character isn’t nearly as interesting as the many secondary ones. Overall, B. 

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