By Elmore Leonard.  Was looking for some light summer reading.  He’s very good at what he does.  From Wikipedia:  His advice to writers also includes the hint, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” 

It reads like a Quentin Tarantino movie (I know Quentin is a big fan) - everyone is a wise guy.

By Ian McEwan.

In his book How Fiction Works, the critic James Wood singles out McEwan’s Atonement as a good example of changing time signatures in prose and “putting oneself in another’s shoes”.  I found the novel dwelt a little too much in the interior lives of the characters for my taste and I found I lost interest.  Perhaps the fact that the main characters are young, aristocratic females in 1940′s England had something to do with it, not giving me too much to sympathize with, though I suppose good fiction should be universal.  Amsterdam has a broader outlook I think – I found it much more readable.