ShelfLook
Tools About
Cover of The Death and Life of Bobby Z

How long does it take to read The Death and Life of Bobby Z?

Don Winslow

The Death and Life of Bobby Z by Don Winslow takes about 4 hours 45 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 45 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1997. 259 pages, about 71,225 words.

10 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 7 hours 55 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 45 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 58 minutes

The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

When Tim Kearney draws a license plate across the throat of a Hell's Angel, he's pretty much a dead man. It's his third crime and, according to California law, that gives him "life without the possibility of parole." Killing a Hell's Angel also makes him a dead man on any prison yard in California. That's when the DEA makes Kearney an offer: impersonate the late, legendary dope smuggler Bobby Z so that the agency can trade him to Don Huertero — northern Mexico's drug kingpin — for a captured DEA agent. Tim Kearney bears an uncanny resemblance to Bobby Z, and, with some training, he might be able to pass. So, he's off to a compound in the middle of a desert that's been designed by Huertero's number-two man to look like the Arab fort in his favorite movie, Beau Jeste. Kearney's surprised when he meets Bobby Z's old flame, Elizabeth, who was never mentioned in his training, and her son, who she claims belongs to him. It's a short vacation by the pool before Kearney's on the run from drug lords, bikers, Indians, and cops ... and the kid's along for the ride. Some of the pursuers want Bobby Z, and some want the considerably less legendary Tim K. Whether he pulls it off, whether he can keep the kid and the girl and his life, makes for a hilarious, fast-paced, and truly touching novel. [from Amazon]

Subjects: Fiction, Drug traffic, False personation, Impostors and imposture, Prisoners, United States

More by Don Winslow

Books like this

Popular books of similar length