Elmore Leonard has written his toughest book in City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit…. It's too bad Leonard felt he needed a subtitle, for the theme is obvious enough: how one vicious killer and one committed cop come to see themselves locked in a classic shootout in the OK Corral of modern America, the city in which the lone hero climbed down from his mustang to climb into his Mustang and do battle once again for the cowardly, blind populace. This is rough stuff: the language, the attitudes, and the people are all unpleasant, products of the city that has grown up over the primeval forest. Theme, plot, writing are obvious, yet compelling.
Robin Winks, in a review of "City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit," in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1980 The New Republic, Inc.), Vol. 183, No. 24, December 13, 1980, p. 40.
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