Anyone else reading Raylan? I'm about 2/3 through it, and I have to say that I'm just not feeling it. A few comments below; please note that there's the odd spoiler.
I will admit that it's been a few years since I read anything new from Leonard, so it might just be that the natural decline of a writer getting on in years feels more abrupt to me. And Pronto was never a particular favorite (I didn't go back to Riding the Rap or "Fire in the Hole" till after I began watching Justfied), so maybe it's just that there's a connection that Leonard has with the literary version of the character that I just don't get.
Even given all that, this really does not read like anything close to prime Leonard IMHO. I don't know what prompted him to try and conflate the TV series with his existing template for Raylan (money? doubt he needs it), but it's a weird amalgam, and I wonder if it reads better to someone who's never seen the series: I keep waiting for changes to pay off (swapping out Bennetts for Crowes; giving Gutterson one line of dialog and never seeing him again; no romantic involvement with Ava, and only the barest of nods to his history with Winona), but the story as it's being laid out here is far less interesting than either previous season of Justified.
As you may have read, it's really not even a novel so much as some short stories stitched together into a loose framework. The first one (involving organ theft) hews very closely to the "book" version of Raylan: among other things, he does a piss-poor job of investigation, and walks into a trap that we all see coming, but which isn't even resolved in a clever way (he just awakens from a drug injection faster than the baddies expect). The middle section is about Carol from the coal company, and compared to the version in the show, it just drags terribly. In some ways, I like this version of Carol---she's much more hard-headed and cold-hearted about the inevitability of the miseries that coal mining inflicts---but she's so casual about condoning murder that she comes off as an unprofessional loose cannon, and having Boyd follow her around was fine as a subplot in the series, but since that's all he's given to do here, it feels like a waste.
And what prompted me to fire this off before I've even finished the book is that Leonard just had Raylan shoot a hat off an armed thug's head; this despite the book more than once reminding us that Raylan doesn't draw unless he's going to shoot to kill.
Maybe the last 60 or so pages will pull it all back together for me, and I'll regret having said all this. But I'm not particularly confident.
