When I buy a book, I generally take the book jacket off while I read it. I keep them, of course, but not while I'm reading the book. The jacket description too often gives away too much of the plot for me, and as I read, I find myself flipping back and forth between the book and the jacket cover, wondering "What's coming next?" Library books, as you know, have their covers scotch-taped to the book, and removing them means a fine. (Reading the description once is not enough for me to feel like I've read the Cliff Notes. It starts to sink in when I read it many times.)

I borrowed Out of Sight from the library. Since I couldn't take the cover off, I flipped more times than I could count. Suffice to say, the jacket description, disappointingly so, gives away the entire plot. To be sure, it left the ending out, saying only that it was a "hair-raising climax that careens pell-mell into suspense-writing history," but it otherwise functioned as the Cliff Notes.

That I didn't consider the ending hair-raising or historic is probably obvious. It was fairly anti-climatic, and not at all the way I wanted it to end. (Is it fair to give a book a poorer rating because it didn't end the way I wanted it to? Why not?)

Still, it was an easy read, and a good choice after the work-related books I've been reading lately. I suppose I also can't blame the author for the book jacket. I liked the major characters, Jack Foley and Karen Sisco, a lot. (The hardest books to read are the ones with the unlikeable characters.) Things wrapped up nicely, without any improbable (and invariably unsatisfactory) "deus ex machina". I wouldn't turn down other books by Leonard.

PS: I've not seen the movie, mind you, but I knew enough of it that George Clooney (Jack) and Jennifer Lopez (Karen) lived in my head the entire time I was reading. Leonard, by the way, is adept, as is Nick Hornby, at getting his books made into movies.