I give up. I'm barely halfway through the audiobook and I'm not going to finish. I probably gave this more of a chance than it deserved, just because it was Elmore Leonard. It had to get better, right?

Nope. After the first couple of chapters of meeting some potentially interesting characters and traveling to an interesting place, all of the interesting departed the story. All that remained was a confusing mush of jumping back and forth in time between boring dialog (not typical of Leonard) about past events, those actual past events, and some current, so-called, action. Viewpoints are jumbled together. Voices are indistinct and many seem too Western. Even the reader had a hard time making it clear who was speaking.

But that all didn't matter much because I stopped caring about the characters long ago. Moving on... ( )

Piratería, negocios turbios, tensión sexual y acción trepidante en la última obra del maestro de la novela negra norteamericana Dara Barr, una afamada directora de documentales, se traslada al Cuerno de África con su cámara y viejo lobo de mar, Xavier LeBo. Su objetivo es realizar un documental sobre los continuos actos de piratería que se producen en aguas de Somalia. Nada es lo que parece ni nadie es lo que dice ser en Yibuti. Poco a poco, Dara y Xavier se irán viendo enredados en una peligrosa trama que tiene por objetivo llevar a cabo un atentado de enormes dimensiones. Las imágenes que han rodado piensan que podrían convertirse en un largometraje con actores que culmine sus carreras, pero también puede costarles la vida.

Dara Barr, documentary filmmaker, is at the top of her game. She’s covered Bosnian women, Neo-Nazis, and post-Katrina New Orleans (for which she won an Oscar), but now she’s looking for an even bigger challenge. So she and her right-hand-man-a six-foot-six, 72-year-old, African-American man named Xavier-head to Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, to tackle modern-day pirates. Once they start filming, though, they find a whole lot more than they bargained for.

They quickly learn that almost nobody in Djibouti is what he seems. A whole mob of colorful characters patrols the surrounding seas, including a pirate commander who’s more like Robin Hood than Captain Hook; a cultured diplomat with dubious connections; a rich playboy who knows more than he lets on; and an American-born terrorist with lofty ambitions. But then there’s the recently hijacked LNG (liquid natural gas) tanker: just the thing an aspiring terrorist is looking for to blow up something big. What Dara and Xavier don’t know, though, is who’s going to be the one to get the prize and what they’re going to do for it.

I never thought I would be glad when an Elmore Leonard book finally ended, but "Djibouti" was hard to get through. Unintersting (to me) plot and characters, either not well defined OR I just didn't care for the characters. ( )

i really don’t like the framing where all of the action happens off page and then is relayed to us by two people talking about it. luckily that’s only in the beginning and it gets better after that. also the ending was not great. ( )