Crime Fiction's Familial Shadows

QUIVER

By Peter Leonard

Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur. 276 pp. $24.95

Life, as our leaders keep reminding us, is unfair, and that's true in spades in the book review game. To start with, roughly a zillion books are published for every one that is reviewed. What's more, even if you do get reviewed -- I speak from hard experience -- your book is far more likely to fall into the hands of a numskull who hates it than to find its way to a sensitive soul who appreciates its greatness. Such is the literary life.

In the case of Peter Leonard's "Quiver," it's unfair to other first novelists that his book will be more widely reviewed than theirs simply because he is Elmore Leonard's son. On the other hand, it's unfair to Peter Leonard that many reviewers will feel compelled to compare his book with those of the master craftsman who is his father. Let's get that part out of the way: The son's fictional skills, as demonstrated in his first novel, are not in the same ballpark as his father's. Of course, neither are those of just about anyone else who writes crime fiction.

Peter Leonard's novel is about a damsel in distress. Her name is Kate McCall, and in short order she loses her husband, has serious problems with her teenage son and is targeted by four crooks who hope to separate her from her wealth. Kate is a bit too good to be true, and the best parts of the novel concern the crooks, who, if not as gloriously quirky as those in Elmore Leonard's novels, are sometimes funny and sometimes scary. They keep the story bouncing along until we reach the point where the plucky mom must kill or be killed.

We learn on the first page that Kate's husband, Owen McCall, was accidentally killed by their son while the two were hunting deer with bow and arrow. Kate once served in the Peace Corps, and Owen was a race car driver who became the owner of a racing franchise. Six months after Owen's death, handsome and glib Jack Curran, Kate's lover during her college years, reenters the picture. In college she finally figured out that he supported himself by stealing cars and selling drugs. One reason she joined the Peace Corps was to get away from him. When he seeks her out 16 years later, she doesn't know that he's just out of prison. He tells her he's become a real estate mogul and persuades her to invest $50,000 in an illusory land deal. Worse, three far more dangerous crooks, Teddy, Celeste and DeJuan, force Jack into a scheme to kidnap Kate's son and hold him for a $2 million ransom. Jack would rather marry Kate than rob her, but the others don't give him a choice.

Now and then, reading along, I would spot what I thought of as an Elmore moment, when something quirky or funny or ultra-realistic would turn up. One comes when a rich man hires DeJuan to kill his hard-bitten wife. When the killer turns up in her bedroom with a gun, the first thing the wife says is "Whatever he's paying you, I'll double it." That's an Elmore moment, as was Jack's timely conversion to Christianity in prison, which won him an early parole. Another of the crooks, Teddy, is profoundly stupid, and his inability to get the point of anything is a running joke. (Example: When someone says love is blind, Teddy thinks it over and says he disagrees because blind people fall in love, too.)

Unfortunately, there are other moments when the younger Leonard, who is a partner in an advertising agency, tries too hard to please us. Kate and Owen meet cute when their shopping carts collide in a grocery store. When Kate's in the Peace Corps in Guatemala, she offends the local police chief, who sends two of his men to rape her. They handcuff her, carry her into the jungle, tear her clothes off -- but then get too drunk to consummate the deed; Leonard wants the drama of the attempted rape but not the reality of it happening to his heroine. Kate has a gal-pal neighbor who's fat, bawdy and straight out of a sitcom: "I'm back on South Beach, my last diet. If this doesn't work, it's lipo." We could have done without the tired comic relief. And it's hard to buy the proposition that smart, tough Kate would be gulled by a smooth-talking ex-con whose criminal proclivities she's known for years.

The novel's early action takes place in and around Detroit and then moves to Kate's lodge in the woods of northern Michigan, where Leonard devises a suspenseful and bloody ending as the four crooks, Kate and her son, some cops and some local hunters, all heavily armed, try to settle things. "Quiver" is an easy read, but it's in no way outstanding. My advice, if you want a shot of Leonard, is to seek out Elmore's overlooked gem "LaBrava." Is that unfair to his son, who in middle age has brought forth his first novel? Perhaps, but it's good advice to readers in search of dazzling crime fiction.