Everything you need to understand or teach Glitz by Elmore Leonard.
One of the best selling detective novels of 1985, Glitz is set in Puerto Rico, Miami Beach, and Atlantic City, though the credible settings are less important than the characters. It is a story of people on the make—gambling casino moguls; gangsters; marginally talented cabaret performers; a San Juan taxicab driver — and the all-consuming desire for revenge, personified by an ex-convict who has dubbed himself "Mr. Magic." Counterpointing all of them is a Miami Beach police lieutenant, the quintessential good guy confronted by evil forces; and typically, for a Leonard novel, the decent man is the hunted: Mora discovers that he is being pursued by someone he had helped to convict almost eight years earlier.
Once more, Leonard develops a favorite theme: An ordinary man, fundamentally good, gets into a scrape, but (in this novel anyway) ultimately prevails over the greedy, evil...
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